EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM

A
C O M P A NI O N T O
E UROPEAN
R OMANTICISM
E DI TED BY M I C HA E L F E RB E R
A Companion to European Romanticism
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E UROPEAN
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E DI TED BY M I C HA E L F E RB E R
ß 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization ß 2005 by Michael Ferber
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A companion to European romanticism / edited by Michael Ferber.
p. cm.— (Blackwell companions to literature and culture; 38)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1039-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-1039-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Romanticism.
I. Ferber, Michael. II. Series.
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Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Michael Ferber
viii
1
1 On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility: Defining Ambivalences
Inger S. B. Brodey
10
2 Shakespeare and European Romanticism
Heike Grundmann
29
3 Scottish Romanticism and Scotland in Romanticism
Fiona Stafford
49
4 Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
Peter Cochran
67
5 The Infinite Imagination: Early Romanticism in Germany
Susan Bernofsky
86
6 From Autonomous Subjects to Self-regulating Structures:
Rationality and Development in German Idealism
Thomas Pfau
101
7 German Romantic Fiction
Roger Paulin
123
8 The Romantic Fairy Tale
Kari Lokke
138
9 German Romantic Drama
Frederick Burwick
157
vi
Contents
10 Early French Romanticism
Fabienne Moore
172
11 The Poetry of Loss: Lamartine, Musset, and Nerval
Jonathan Strauss
192
12 Victor Hugo’s Poetry
E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
208
13 French Romantic Drama
Barbara T. Cooper
224
14 Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
Piero Garofalo
238
15 Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi: Italy’s Classical Romantics
Margaret Brose
256
16 Spanish Romanticism
Derek Flitter
276
17 Pushkin and Romanticism
Michael Basker
293
18 Lermontov: Romanticism on the Brink of Realism
Robert Reid
309
19 Adam Mickiewicz and the Shape of Polish Romanticism
Roman Koropeckyj
326
20 The Revival of the Ode
John Hamilton
345
21 ‘‘Unfinish’d Sentences’’: The Romantic Fragment
Elizabeth Wanning Harries
360
22 Romantic Irony
Jocelyne Kolb
376
23 Sacrality and the Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth Century
Virgil Nemoianu
393
24 Nature
James C. McKusick
413
25 Romanticism and Capitalism
Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy
433
26 Napoleon and European Romanticism
Simon Bainbridge
450
Contents
27 Orientalism
Diego Saglia
28 A Continent of Corinnes: The Romantic Poetess and
the Diffusion of Liberal Culture in Europe, 1815-50
Patrick Vincent
vii
467
486
29 Lighting Up Night
Lilian R. Furst
505
30 Romantic Opera
Benjamin Walton
522
31 At Home with German Romantic Song
James Parsons
538
32 The Romantic System of the Arts
Michael Ferber
552
Index
571
Notes on Contributors
Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and
author of the monographs Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University
Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of
Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also published his work in journals
such as Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net, and The Byron Journal. He is a past
president of the British Association for Romantic Studies.
Michael Basker is Reader in Russian and Head of Russian Studies at the University
of Bristol. He has written widely on Russian poetry, particularly of the early twentieth
century, and is currently a coeditor of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ 10-volume
Complete Works of Nikolai Gumilev. Among his publications on Pushkin are an
annotated edition of The Bronze Horseman (Bristol Classical Press, 2000), an Introduction and extensive notes to the revised Penguin Classics translation of Eugene Onegin
(2003), and translations of some of Pushkin’s critical and historical writing in The
Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin (Milner, 2000-3).
Susan Bernofsky, the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe
(2005), works on German Romanticism, Modernism, and translation history and
theory. She has published articles on Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Robert Walser, and is currently at
work on a book on Walser.
E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have edited and translated 13 volumes of nineteenthcentury French literature. Their Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (University of Chicago
Press) received the American Literary Translators’ Prize and the Modern Language
Association Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation. Their other publications include
literary criticism, psycholinguistics, and studies of grammatical awareness.
Inger S. B. Brodey is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Adjunct
Professor in Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has
Notes on Contributors
ix
published widely on Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Johann W. von Goethe, and
Natsume Soseki, including Rediscovering Natsume Soseki (2000). A forthcoming work
entitled Ruined by Design focuses on the history of the novel and the philosophy and
aesthetics surrounding the culture of sensibility.
Margaret Brose is currently Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, where she is also Director of the Italian Studies
Program, and will be Director, University of California Education Abroad Programs
in Italy, 2005-7. She previously taught at the University of Colorado and Yale
University, and has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She has written
widely on all periods of Italian literature. In 2000 she was awarded the Modern
Language Association Marraro-Scaglione Prize for the outstanding publication in
Italian Literary Studies for her book, Leopardi sublime: la poetica della temporalità
(1998). She is presently working on a book entitled The Body of Italy: Allegories of
the Female Figure.
Frederick Burwick has taught at UCLA since 1965, and during that time has also
enjoyed eight years in visiting positions in Germany at the universities of Würzburg,
Siegen, Göttingen, and Bamberg. He has lectured at the universities of Heidelberg,
Cologne, Giessen, Leipzig, and Jena in Germany as well as Oxford and Cambridge in
England. He is author and editor of 20 books and over a hundred articles and reviews,
and his research is dedicated to problems of perception, illusion, and delusion in
literary representation and theatrical performance. As a director, he has brought to the
stage Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists (in 2000), Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s Jest,
Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning (in 2002), and many other plays of the Romantic era.
Peter Cochran is the editor of the Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review. He has
lectured on Byron in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Newstead, Glasgow, Liverpool,
Versailles, Salzburg, Yerevan, and New York, and published numerous articles on the
poet. He is author of the Byron entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English
Literature (1999), and of the entries on J. C. Hobhouse and E. J. Trelawny for the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
Barbara T. Cooper is Professor of French at the University of New Hampshire. She is
a specialist in French drama of the first half of the nineteenth century and the works of
Alexandre Dumas père. She has edited Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (2004) and a
volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography on French Dramatists, 1789-1914 (1998)
and published numerous articles in professional journals and books.
Michael Ferber is Professor of English and Humanities at the University of New
Hampshire. He has written two books on William Blake, one on Percy Shelley, and A
Dictionary of Literary Symbols (1999); most recently he has edited and partly translated
an anthology of European Romantic Poetry (2005).
Derek Flitter is Head of Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He
has published extensively on Spanish Romanticism and its relationship with other
x
Notes on Contributors
periods of literature and ideas, including Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism
(Cambridge 1992), Teorı́a y crı́tica del romanticismo español (Cambridge 1995) and the
jointly authored Don Álvaro et le drama romantique espagnol (Dijon 2003). His latest
book, Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History: Ideology and the Historical Imagination,
is to appear in 2005. He contributed to the new Cambridge History of Spanish Literature
and is completing the Romanticism volume for Palgrave’s European Culture and
Society series.
Lilian R. Furst, Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Romanticism in Perspective
(1969), Romanticism (1969), Counterparts (1977), The Contours of European Romanticism
(1979), European Romanticism: Self-Definition (1980), and Fictions of Romantic Irony
(1984). More recently she has worked on realism and on literature and medicine.
Piero Garofalo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of New Hampshire.
He has published extensively on Italian Romanticism including articles on Berchet,
Leopardi, Manzoni, Niccolini, and Pellico. He is the coauthor of Ciak . . . si parla
italiano: Cinema for Italian Conversation (2005) and coeditor of Re-Viewing Fascism:
Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (2002).
Heike Grundmann is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the
University of Munich and has also taught at the University of Heidelberg. She has
published a book on the hermeneutics of remembering and articles on Shakespeare,
Coleridge, Kleist, and others. Her current research project deals with ‘‘Fools, Clowns,
and Madmen in Shakespeare’s Plays.’’
John Hamilton is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at
Harvard University. He is the author of Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the
Classical Tradition (2004).
Elizabeth Wanning Harries teaches English and Comparative Literature at Smith
College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of Modern Languages. Her book The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in
the Later Eighteenth Century was published in 1994; a related article is ‘‘ ‘Excited Ideas’:
Fragments, Description, and the Sublime,’’ in Del Frammento, ed. Rosa Maria Losito
(2000). Recently she has been writing about European fairy tales; her book Twice upon
a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale came out in paperback in 2003.
Jocelyne Kolb is a Professor of German Studies at Smith College. She has published
on European Romanticism and literary revolution in the works of Goethe, Byron,
Heine, and Hugo; on the relationship of music and literature in the works of
Hoffmann, Heine, and Thomas Mann; and on literal and figurative constructions of
Jewishness in Lessing, Heine, and Fontane.
Roman Koropeckyj is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
UCLA. He is the author of The Poetics of Revitalization: Adam Mickiewicz Between
Notes on Contributors
xi
Forefathers’ Eve, part 3 and Pan Tadeusz (2001) as well as articles on Polish and
Ukrainian literatures.
Kari Lokke is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California,
Davis. She is the author of Gérard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary (1987), Tracing
Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence (2004) and coeditor, with
Adriana Craciun, of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution
(2001). Research and teaching interests include women poets of the Romantic era,
Romantic aesthetics and historiography, and theories of myth.
Michael Löwy has been Research Director in Sociology at the National Center for
Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, since 1978 and Lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, since 1981. His publications include Georg Lukàcs:
From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1981), Redemption and Utopia: Libertarian Judaism in
Central Europe (1992), On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl
Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993), The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America
(1996), Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question (1998), and
Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity with Robert Sayre (2001).
James C. McKusick is Professor of English and Dean of the Davidson Honors
College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His books include Green
Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Palgrave, 2000), Literature and Nature: Four Centuries
of Nature Writing, coedited with Bridget Keegan (Prentice-Hall, 2001), and Coleridge’s
Philosophy of Language (Yale University Press, 1986). He has also published more than
20 articles and over two dozen reviews in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies,
English Literary History, European Romantic Review, Keats-Shelley Journal, Modern Philology, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, University of
Toronto Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle.
Fabienne Moore is Assistant Professor of French in the department of Romance
Languages at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2001. She is completing her first book
on The Dynamics of Prose and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century France. A History of ‘‘Poëmes en
Prose.’’ Her next project, Chateaubriand’s Lost Paradises, connects Chateaubriand’s
haunting theme of the Fall with his travels to the New World and the Orient to
show how his descriptions and meditations anticipate today’s postcolonial discourse.
Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and
Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He has also taught at the Universities of California (Berkeley and San
Diego), Bucharest (Romania), Cincinnati, and Amsterdam. His The Triumph of Imperfection, to be published by the end of 2005 by the University of South Carolina
University Press, is a study of early nineteenth-century European literary and cultural
discourses.
xii
Notes on Contributors
James Parsons is Professor of Music History at Missouri State University. He edited
and contributed two essays to The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (2004). He has
lectured in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, and has published on the
music of Mozart, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Beethoven, Schubert, and Hanns Eisler
for such publications as Beethoven Forum and the Journal of the American Musicological
Society. He is currently working on a book-length study of twentieth-century German
song for which he was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Fulbright Commission.
Roger Paulin has been Schröder Professor of German at Cambridge since 1989. He is
the author of Ludwig Tieck (1985), The Brief Compass: The Nineteenth-century German
Novelle (1985), and The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany (2003)
Thomas Pfau is Eads Family Professor of English and Professor of German at Duke
University. His publications include Idealism and the Endgame of Theory (1994), Wordsworth’s Profession (1997), Lessons of Romanticism (1998), and Romantic Moods: Paranoia,
Trauma, Melancholy, 1780-1840 (2005). His essays have appeared in numerous collections and journals, including MLN, Journal of the History of Ideas, Studies in
Romanticism, Romanticism, and New Literary History. At present he is embarking on a
new project that explores the Romantic conception of Bildung as a matrix for the
production of aesthetic forms and social knowledge across numerous nineteenthcentury disciplines (biology, instrumental music and musical aesthetics, the novel,
speculative philosophy, and dialectical materialism) between 1780 and 1914.
Robert Reid is Reader in Russian Studies at Keele University. His research centers on
nineteenth-century Russian literature, particularly the Romantic period. His publications in this area include Problems of Russian Romanticism (Gower, 1986); Pushkin’s
‘‘Mozart and Salieri’’ (Rodopi, 1995); Lermontov’s ‘‘A Hero of Our Time’’ (Bristol Classical
Press, 1997); and Two Hundred Years of Pushkin (Rodopi, 2003).
Diego Saglia is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università di Parma,
Italy. His main research interest is British literature of the Romantic period, also in its
connections with Continental Romanticisms, and especially such areas as exoticism,
the culture of consumption and luxury, the Gothic, gender and women’s verse,
legitimate drama and historical tragedy, representations of war, and national ideologies. He is the author of Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of
Iberia (2000), and his articles on Romantic literature have appeared in ELH, Studies in
Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Notes and Queries, Comparative Literature
Studies, Studies in the Novel, and the Keats-Shelley Journal. His latest publication is a
book-length study of British Orientalism, I discorsi dell’esotico: l’oriente nel romanticismo
britannico (2002).
Robert Sayre is an American who lives and teaches in France at the University of
Marne-la-Vallée. He has written on various topics in modern French, English, and
American literatures, notably involving Romanticism. He is coauthor, with Michael
Notes on Contributors
xiii
Löwy, of Révolte et mélancolie: le romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité (1992), which
has more recently appeared in a revised, augmented English translation: Romanticism
Against the Tide of Modernity (2001).
Fiona Stafford is a Reader in English at Somerville College, Oxford, who works on
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and on the relationships between
English, Scottish, and Irish writing. Her books include Starting Lines in Scottish,
Irish and English Poetry, from Burns to Heaney (2000), The Last of the Race: The Growth
of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (1994), and The Sublime Savage: James MacPherson and
the Poems of Ossian (1988).
Jonathan Strauss is Associate Professor and Chair of French and Italian at Miami
University. He is the author of Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self
(1998) and numerous articles on subjects in French literature from the eighteenth
through twentieth centuries. The editor of a special edition of Diacritics (Fall 2000) on
attitudes toward death in nineteenth-century France, he is currently completing a
book entitled Human Remains: An Essay on the Materiality of the Past.
Patrick Vincent is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of
Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He is the author of The Romantic Poetess: European Culture,
Politics and Gender, 1820-1840 (2004).
Benjamin Walton is Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. Recent publications include articles in 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, and a
chapter for the Cambridge Companion to Rossini (2004). He is currently completing a
book on music, politics, and society in Restoration France.
Introduction
Michael Ferber
The Word ‘‘Romantic’’
In 1798, among the Schlegel circle in Jena, the word ‘‘romantic’’ (German romantisch)
was definitively attached to a kind of literature and distinguished from another kind,
‘‘classic’’ (klassisch); it was soon attached to the Schlegel circle itself as a ‘‘school’’ of
literature, and the rest is history. But the word already had behind it a good deal of
history, which made it the almost inevitable choice.
Nonetheless the word came down to the Schlegels and their friends through some
interesting accidents. It is one of the oddities of etymology that ‘‘romantic’’ ultimately
derives from Latin Roma, the city of Rome, for surely the ancient Romans, as we
usually think of them, were the least romantic of peoples. It is then a pleasant irony of
cultural history that one of the distinctive themes of writers (and painters) whom we
now call Romantic was the ruins of Rome – as in Chateaubriand’s René (1802),
Wilhelm Schlegel’s ‘‘Rom: Elegie’’ (1805), Staël’s Corinne (1807), Byron’s Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4 (1812), Lamartine’s ‘‘La Liberté ou une nuit à Rome’’
(1822), and so on – while a large share of the Italian tourism industry today depends
on the image of Rome as The Romantic City. Indeed the romantic ruins of ancient
Rome could be taken as an emblem of the meaning and history of the word
‘‘romantic’’ itself.
The odd turn in its etymology took place in the Middle Ages. From the adjective
Romanus had come a secondary adjective Romanicus, and from that the adverb Romanice, ‘‘in the Roman manner,’’ though that form is not attested in the literature. Latin
speakers in Roman Gaul would have pronounced romanice something like ‘‘romansh’’
and then ‘‘romants’’ or ‘‘romaunts.’’ By then the Franks had conquered Gaul and made
it ‘‘France,’’ but the Franks spoke a Germanic language akin to Dutch, so ‘‘romants’’
(spelled romauns, romaunz, romance, and several other ways) was enlisted to distinguish
the Roman or Latin language of the Gallo-Romans from ‘‘French’’ or Frankish of their
conquerors. Eventually, of course, the Franks gave up their language and adopted the
2
Michael Ferber
romauns language, and the word ‘‘French’’ switched its reference to what we now call
Old French, the descendant of vulgar Latin spoken in France. Yet romauns remained in
use to distinguish that spoken or vernacular form of Latin (that is, ‘‘French’’) from the
older, more or less frozen, form of Latin used by the church and court. (‘‘Romance’’ is
still the adjective for all the daughter languages of Latin: French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Romanian, and the rest.)
Romauns had also been applied to anything written in Gallo-Roman Old French
and, even after ‘‘French’’ had replaced it as the name for the language, it remained in
use for the typical kind of literature written in it, that is, what we still call
‘‘romances,’’ the tales of chivalry, magic, and love, especially the Arthurian stories.
These romances are the ancestors of the novel, and the word for ‘‘novel’’ in French
became romant and then roman. German, Russian, and other languages have borrowed
the French term for ‘‘novel,’’ but English took its term from Italian novella, that is,
storia novella, ‘‘new (story),’’ and limited ‘‘romance’’ first to the original medieval
works and then to a particular kind of novel: for example, Scott’s Ivanhoe: A Romance,
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, or the ‘‘Harlequin Romances’’ of today.
Romant or roman formed several adjectives, such as romantesque and romanesque, the
latter now used in art history to refer to the style preceding Gothic, and German
romanisch. By the seventeenth century romantique appeared in French and ‘‘romantick’’
in English, but they did not catch on until the mid-eighteenth century, largely under
the influence of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-46), translated almost immediately into the main European languages, where we find ‘‘romantic Mountain,’’
‘‘romantic View,’’ and clouds ‘‘roll’d into romantic Shapes.’’ By the 1760s Wieland
and Herder are using romantisch in Germany, and Letourneur and Girardin are using
romantique in France, sometimes, as Thomas Warton did in his Romantic Fiction
(1774), to refer to kinds of literature.
When Friedrich Schlegel and his circle began writing of romantische Poesie and the
like, they were hearkening back to the old use of romauns as a term distinct from
‘‘Latin,’’ for one of the emergent meanings is its contrast with ‘‘classic,’’ that is, Greek
and Latin literature. Friedrich Schlegel did not quite use ‘‘Romantic’’ as a period term.
He denied that he identified ‘‘Romantic’’ with ‘‘modern,’’ for he recognized some
contemporary writers as classical; rather, ‘‘I seek and find the Romantic among the
older Moderns,’’ he wrote, ‘‘in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that
age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are
derived’’ (Dialogue on Poetry, 1800, trans. Lilian Furst, in Furst 1980: 8-9). In his
circle, however, romantisch became nearly identified with ‘‘modern,’’ or ‘‘Christian,’’
while sometimes it was narrowed to a sense connected to Roman as ‘‘novel’’ and meant
‘‘novelish’’ or ‘‘novelic,’’ the novel being a characteristically modern genre.
Thus launched as a term for a trend in literature, and for those who launched the
term itself, ‘‘romantic’’ within a decade or two was received and debated throughout
Europe. It is worth remembering, in view of the indelible label later generations have
given them, that in Britain neither the exactly contemporaneous ‘‘Lake School’’
(Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb), nor the next generation (Byron, Shelley,
Introduction
3
Keats, Hunt), nor anyone else called themselves Romantics at the time. Thanks
especially to Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany) (1813), which reported
on her encounters with the ‘‘Romantic’’ school as well as with Goethe and Schiller, the
romantic–classic distinction entered European discussion permanently. By 1810
romanticeskij was in use in Russia, by 1814 romantico in Italy, by 1818 romantico in
Spain. In his 1815 Preface to the Poems Wordsworth distinguished between the
‘‘classic lyre’’ and the ‘‘romantic harp’’; these instruments became common synecdoches for contrasting artistic commitments, as in Victor Hugo’s ‘‘La Lyre et la harpe’’
(1822), though he does not use ‘‘classic’’ or ‘‘romantic’’ to define them. As period
terms, ‘‘classic’’ (or ‘‘neoclassic’’) and ‘‘romantic’’ remain standard today in literary
history, art history, and, to a lesser degree, in music history.
Defining Romanticism
Since almost the moment they appeared as the name of a school of literature, the
words ‘‘Romantic’’ and ‘‘Romanticism’’ in various languages have been explained,
queried, re-explained, criticized, defended, mocked, withdrawn, reasserted, finally
laid to rest, and revived from the dead, too many times to count. In the twentieth
century, scholarly essays for or against this label – I shall consider the terms one label,
and capitalize them – so often began by quoting long lists of completely disparate
definitions, alike only in the confidence with which they were put forth, that it
became a generic requirement of such essays, which for that very reason I can forgo
here. (I will give a different sort of list in a moment.) It was not the term itself that
was at stake, though some have argued for a different one; it was not even the fact that
specialists completely disagreed on their definitions, though that was embarrassing
enough; it was the suspicion, made explicit by A. O. Lovejoy in his famous article
‘‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’’ (1924, reprinted 1948), that the term
referred to nothing at all. In Lovejoy’s formulation, ‘‘The word ‘romantic’ has come to
mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the
function of a verbal sign’’ (1948: 232).
Lovejoy’s essay carried many scholars with him, but very few, I think, gave up using
the term. It was, and remains, too deeply entrenched, too familiar, in the end too
attractive, to be discarded. Here, as evidence, is a list of titles of books that have
appeared in the last 30 years or so:
Romanticism: An Anthology (1994, 1998)
Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838 (1995)
Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (1997)
Women Romantic Poets 1785-1832: An Anthology (1992)
Poesı́a Romántica (1999)
La Poésie romantique française (1973)
Romantic Art (1978) (reprinted in 1994 as Romanticism and Art, a slight retreat)
4
Michael Ferber
German Romantic Painting (1980, 1994)
British Romantic Painting (1989)
Romanticism (on art) (1979)
Romanticism (again; on art) (2001)
The Romantic Movement (1994)
Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music (1969, 1988)
Romantic Music (1984)
The Romantic Generation (on music) (1995).
Perhaps with Lovejoy’s anathema echoing in their minds, several editors have avoided
the misleading implication that their anthologies contain only Romantics (the one
called Romanticism: An Anthology includes Godwin and Paine, for instance) and
shunted the word into a period category:
The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993)
Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology (1998)
British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (1997)
Great German Poems of the Romantic Era (1995) (the German title is Berühmte Gedichte
der deutschen Romantik, which is more ambiguous)
Gedichte der Romantik (1988) (also ambiguous)
Painting of the Romantic Era (1999).
One sees their point, but it doesn’t really get around Lovejoy’s strictures, and it raises
a new question, to which I shall return, concerning the aptness of certain historical
labeling. I have noticed only one major anthology in English that goes all the way
with Lovejoy: British Literature 1780-1832. A prominent French anthology, Anthologie
de la poésie française du XIX siècle, is filled with poets usually called Romantics from
Chateaubriand to Baudelaire.
With very few exceptions, then, scholars have continued to embrace the term that
Lovejoy said meant nothing. It probably does little harm that we use the word in titles
of books and university courses, as long as we remind readers and students from time to
time that the word is rather vague, somewhat arbitrary, and under dispute. And our
periodic efforts to ventilate the arguments over the word and its application probably
does some good as well, by demonstrating the complexities of cultural history or
‘‘genealogy,’’ as a term somewhat arbitrary in origin got pressed into service in various
polemics, institutionalized in universities and professional associations, and so on.
I am not alone, however, in feeling a little uncomfortable with this situation,
familiar though it is. People do ask us, after all, what Romanticism was, who the
Romantics were, when it started and ended (if it ended), and the like. Was Blake
a Romantic? Was Byron? Leopardi? Hölderlin? Pushkin? Baudelaire? Not that
we need feel obliged to offer a sound-bite-sized answer to these questions, but we
ought to have a shorter and more obliging one at hand than a history of the
vicissitudes of the term. The task does not seem hopeless, and I have a modest
Introduction
5
proposal or two for altering the framework in which we usually think about the
subject. They might at least tidy up the situation so we can take stock of the problem
more clearly.
I think we first need to ponder what a definition is, the definition of definition, if
that’s not begging the question, and to do so we must return to Lovejoy. In his article
Lovejoy presents three groups that have been called ‘‘romantic’’: the school of Joseph
Warton, the Jena circle around the Schlegels, and a group of one, Chateaubriand. He
can find no common denominator, no single significant trait the three groups share.
‘‘Romanticism A,’’ he writes, ‘‘may have one characteristic presupposition or impulse,
X, which it shares with Romanticism B, another characteristic, Y, which it shares
with Romanticism C, to which X is wholly foreign’’ (Lovejoy 1948: 236). We can
illustrate his claim with a Venn diagram, and round out his claim by showing that B
and C might share a trait Z wholly foreign to A.
A
X
B
Y
Z
C
Now an easy answer to Lovejoy would be to say that the Warton school is a case of
‘‘pre-Romanticism’’ or ‘‘sensibility,’’ as is Chateaubriand for the most part, but I will
set that aside. Another would be to adduce several other groups, such as the Lake
School (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey), the Cockney and Satanic Schools (Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Hunt), the later Romantics in Germany (e.g., Brentano, Eichendorff,
Chamisso), the Hugo cénacle in France, and perhaps Mickiewicz and Pushkin, to see
how many other significant traits emerge. Something like this second course, I find, is
a fruitful way to proceed: Lovejoy’s evidence, for all his erudition, is too slender. But
there is a more interesting point. Lovejoy assumes that a term lacks a definition if
there is no one characteristic trait that the term always refers to, and that assumption
is too narrow.
In his famous reply to Lovejoy, René Wellek (1949) proposes three traits or
‘‘norms’’ shared by those authors whom we still call Romantic: imagination for the
view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style.
Some whom we want to call Romantic, he concedes, elude one criterion or another:
Byron did not see the imagination as the fundamental creative power, and ‘‘Blake
stands somewhat apart’’ with regard to nature (surely an understatement). But the
6
Michael Ferber
three norms are found quite widely across European literature, and those who display
one of them usually display the others.
Wellek’s argument has also carried many scholars with him, though Geoffrey
Hartman may have been right to say that the debate is a standoff (Hartman 1975:
277). If it is a standoff, however, it may be the fault of a common trait between the
two sides, for Wellek shares with Lovejoy the same notion of definition, except that in
Wellek’s view it is not one trait we are looking for but three. (Or rather, since the
three are interlinked, they are really one, though a fairly complicated one, which may
not be fully expressed in each Romantic.) Wellek’s case is embarrassed by the
exceptions he cites, however: if Byron is not a Romantic, or only two-thirds of a
Romantic, then we had better go back to the dictionary.
The Lovejoy–Wellek debate has been replayed many times (for surveys see, for
example, Remak 1961, McGann 1983, Parker 1991), almost invariably under the
same rules: the search, or the abandonment of the search, for a common denominator.
It seems to me a better way forward is to adopt Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘‘family
resemblances.’’ In a family of 10 people, for instance, there may be five or six
distinctive facial or bodily features that recur among them, but it might turn out
that two or even three members share none of them. They might each have two of
the traits, but the other members of the family each have four or five of them, so
there are many overlaps, and when you have had a good look at, say, five members
of the family, you can pick out the other five from a crowd. A definition based on
this idea would amount to a list of distinctive traits, with some ranking as to
importance and generality, but no one trait, maybe not even two or three, would be
decisive.
Such a list might well begin with Wellek’s three norms, and then several others of
comparable sweep that have been put forward recently, followed by eight or ten more
concrete ones:
imagination for the view of poetry
nature for the view of the world
symbol and myth for poetic style
‘‘natural supernaturalism’’ (Carlyle, via M. H. Abrams 1971) or perhaps ‘‘spilt
religion’’ (T. E. Hulme 1936)
‘‘a profound change, not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality’’
(Northrop Frye 1963: 5)
‘‘internalization of quest romance’’ (Harold Bloom 1971)
lyricization of literature
the fragment as privileged form
disdain for Newtonian science and utilitarianism
history or development as framework for biology, sociology, law, etc.
themes: the uniqueness of childhood; the dignity of primitives, solitaries, noble
savages, outcast poets; night as the setting for deepest imaginative truth; incest as
ideal; ruins, especially by moonlight; etc.
Introduction
7
metaphors: lamp or fountain, as opposed to mirror; Aeolian harp and ‘‘correspondent
breeze’’; organism as opposed to machine; volcanoes; etc.
And I will toss in one more metaphor that I’ve noticed recently: poets as eagles. It seems
to be a distinctive habit of Romantic writers in at least Britain, Germany, France, and
Russia to compare themselves and each other to eagles. Since ancient times poets have
been nightingales, swans, or larks, but with the main exception of Pindar poets did not
presume to liken themselves to eagles until the later eighteenth century, when large
flocks of them gather in the skies of poetry and circle there until about 1850, after
which they rapidly thin out. It may seem trivial, but there they are in Blake, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Byron, Shelley, Hemans, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Lamartine, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Tastu, Vigny, Alfieri, Coronado, and Pushkin, not to
mention those I have missed, all standing for the poet or genius or creative enthusiasm.
Eagles come oddly close to the single X that Lovejoy could not find!
Such a roster will look somewhat like the table of ‘‘elements’’ of West European
Romanticism offered by Henry H. H. Remak, where he lists such items as folklore,
medievalism, individualism, nature, and Weltschmerz and notes whether they were
strong features in five national literatures. His proposal deserves better than the weak
response it has received: reconsidered in the light of Wittgenstein’s idea, and with
some new features to consider, it seems promising. He concludes from it that ‘‘the
evidence pointing to the existence in Western Europe of a widespread, distinct and
fairly simultaneous pattern of thoughts, attitudes and beliefs associated with the
connotation ‘Romanticism’ is overwhelming’’ (Remak 1961: 236).
Of course definitions should be fairly brief, and the family-resemblance approach
could tend toward prolix ‘‘thick descriptions,’’ but it seems to me our discussions
would be more fruitful under this aegis than under the compulsion to search for the
single decisive feature or set of features. Moreover, though it may not seem so at first,
the more writers one considers the easier it is to discern recurring traits. Lovejoy
offered three groups; one should look at eight or ten. For that reason, and for the way
they would highlight forms and styles as opposed to themes or symbols, I suggest we
bring painting and music under consideration as well. The painters and composers are
as various and distinctive, no doubt, as the writers, but when they are brought onto
the stage I think certain family traits stand out, such as the ‘‘musicalization’’ of the
other arts, the rise of short forms, and the prominence of deliberate fragments. (I make
a case for a Romantic ‘‘system’’ of the arts in the final chapter in this volume.) And of
course certain Romantic literary themes persist, such as the consecration of the artist
in self-portraiture, virtuoso performances (Paganini, Liszt, Chopin), and ‘‘confessional’’ music (Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Lélio); landscape painting and
music that evokes an outdoor setting (notably in Berlioz and Liszt), not to mention
settings of songs about nature and wandering; and Orientalism.
It is usually harmless enough to refer to the years 1789 to 1832, or 1820 to 1850,
depending on the country, as the ‘‘Age of Romanticism’’ or ‘‘The Romantic Period’’: it
8
Michael Ferber
will be clear that one is conferring a certain distinction on a major trend in literature
or all the arts but is not necessarily claiming that it or they had a monopoly. Yet one
can easily slide without thinking into a notion of cultural homogeneity or at least the
assumption that everything was touched by ‘‘the spirit of the age,’’ in Hazlitt’s phrase,
or the Zeitgeist. Strained efforts to show that Austen or Landor or Godwin was a
Romantic often show this unexamined assumption at work. A recent claim, now
withdrawn, that there was a distinct ‘‘women’s Romanticism’’ in England, whose
main features were flatly opposed to those of ‘‘men’s Romanticism,’’ seemed in the
grip of the same idea. In any period there will be various norms, trends, tastes, or
schools, and at times none of them will be dominant. Just when Romanticism became
dominant, as most scholars think it did, is not easy to decide. In England we often
open the period at 1789, the date of Blake’s Songs of Innocence that also nicely coincides
with the beginning of the French Revolution, but Blake went unnoticed until well
after his death and is not altogether a Romantic anyway. 1798 looks like another good
starting date, the year of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads that happily
coincides with the formation of the Jena group. But it took some years for their book
to make its mark; it was not a bestseller. It might not be until 1812, then, when
Byron awoke to find himself famous for Childe Harold, that we can rightly claim that
Romanticism became the dominant complex or norm, though Byron would have been
astonished to hear it. The closing date of English Romanticism is often taken to be
1832, with the Reform Bill as the marker but with a sense that the recent deaths of
the three younger Romantics (and Blake) put an end to something. But is Tennyson
not a Romantic? And the Brontës? Surely Romantic norms were spreading everywhere even as new norms were taking shape. What we call (meaninglessly) the
Victorian era might rightly be called Romantic. Yeats called himself one of the last
Romantics, but may well have been mistaken. An era when millions of people flock to
see The Lord of the Rings might forgivably be called Romantic still. Looking to other
countries, and to the other arts, the same complexities recur and compound each
other.
The lesson in all this is simply to keep distinct the uses of ‘‘Romantic’’ as a complex
or system of norms and ‘‘Romantic’’ as a period. We can still usefully debate the
meaning of the former along the lines I have suggested, and trace its anticipation in
earlier periods and its persistence into later periods, that is, periods other than that of
its first full flowering. This volume, by and large, confines itself to this ‘‘classic’’
period of Romanticism, but I have not tried to impose any definition of Romanticism
as a system or even suggest that contributors should have one of their own. Some
contributors may tend toward Lovejoyan skepticism, others toward Wellekian optimism, but I think I can trace through most of these excellent essays some striking
family resemblances in the midst of a rich and colorful variety.
Introduction
9
References
Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism.
New York: Norton.
Bloom, Harold (1971). ‘‘The Internalization of
Quest Romance.’’ In The Ringers in the Tower.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1335.
Frye, Northrop (1963). ‘‘The Drunken Boat: The
Revolutionary Element in Romanticism.’’ In
N. Frye (ed.), Romanticism Reconsidered. New
York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-25.
Furst, Lilian R. (1980). European Romanticism. London: Methuen.
Hartman, Geoffrey (1975). ‘‘On the Theory of Romanticism.’’ In The Fate of Reading and Other
Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hulme, T. E. (1936). Speculations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Lovejoy, A. O. ([1924] 1948). ‘‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.’’ In Essays in the His-
tory of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, pp. 228-53.
McGann, Jerome J. (1983). The Romantic Ideology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parker, Mark (1991). ‘‘Measure and Countermeasure: The Lovejoy-Wellek Debate and Romantic
Periodization.’’ In David Perkins (ed.), Theoretical Issues in Literary History. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, pp. 227-47.
Remak, Henry H. H. (1961). ‘‘West European
Romanticism: Definition and Scope.’’ In Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (eds.), Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, pp. 223-59.
Wellek, René (1949). ‘‘The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History.’’ Comparative Literature, 1: 1-23, 147-72.
1
On Pre-Romanticism or
Sensibility: Defining
Ambivalences
Inger S. B. Brodey
The Gap Between Enlightenment and Romantic Literature
On September 3, 1967, at 2 a.m., Swedish government and transportation officials
executed a nationwide edict to switch traffic from driving on the left side of the street
to the right. With military precision (and, in fact, the assistance of the army), the
Swedish government distributed a 30-page document to each individual household,
stopped all traffic for five hours, rearranged signage, and allowed traffic to resume on
the opposite side of the street from the previous day.
Although there have been times in history where matters of culture or taste have
seemed to reverse themselves suddenly, seldom do historical periods begin or end with
such militaristic precision. The transition in Europe from Enlightenment Classicism
to Romanticism has frequently been described in dichotomous terms – opposing, for
example, Enlightenment or classical preference for rational order and symmetry with
Romantic preference for spontaneity, fragmentation, and organicism. Indeed, the
traits of Romantic and Enlightenment thought seem so dichotomous that it is hard
to imagine the mechanisms of a transition between them. What suits the convenience
of historians and their students, however, also tends to suit the historical selfunderstanding of individual epochs that define themselves in contrast to that which
preceded them. Accordingly, in order to benefit from periodicization or even to
identify the dominant traits of what Erwin Panofsky called the ‘‘mental habit’’ of an
age, or what Michel Foucault called ‘‘episteme,’’ one must often ignore family characteristics: large undercurrents of shared assumptions.
The second half of the eighteenth century in England, and also largely in Germany
and France, has long been victim of a tug-of-war between the classical and the
Romantic, between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. English letters has had no
‘‘Storm and Stress’’ period, no established name to give to a long transition between
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
11
periods that appear so different in nature. As a result there has been a tendency for
Romanticism – already so voluminous and variable that the term can hardly bear its
own weight – to swallow half of the eighteenth century as well, through the term ‘‘PreRomantic,’’ a term that stems from observations made in the 1930s of conspicuous
parallels between European music and literature of the 1740s to the 1790s.
There has also been much dispute about the exact dates to attach to Sensibility. On
the one hand, there are scholars who are engaged in extending the earlier boundary: such
scholars have tried to claim that Sensibility is a subset of Enlightenment, including
Jessica Riskin’s (2002) recent work on medical discourse in Sensibility, where she claims
that French and American Enlightenment thought was imbued with the language and
philosophy of Sensibility. Other scholars are engaged in extending the later boundary,
not only those who call it Pre-Romanticism, but also scholars such as Julie Ellison
(1990), who has claimed that Romanticism itself is an episode within Sensibility.
In Germany, Pre-Romantic movements in music have been separated into Sturm und
Drang (represented by artists such as Joseph Haydn) and the empfindsamer Stil (represented by artists such as C. P. E. Bach). There is a complex relationship between these
musical modes and the Frühromantik, Empfindsamkeit, and the Jena school of Romanticism in literature and philosophy. While it will not be a goal of this essay to untangle
this web of movements, most scholars would name the Sturm und Drang or ‘‘Storm and
Stress’’ movement as the most conspicuous manifestation of pre-Romanticism in
German literature, featuring the extremely influential Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
by Goethe (1774).1 In France, Pre-Romanticism also has numerous manifestations,
including sensibilité, and the comédie larmoyante, exerting influence over French literary
styles in both the novel and theater. In English literature, Pre-Romantic manifestations
include both Sensibility and the Gothic (or Gothick) – largely overlapping, yet
seemingly distinguishable movements. The relationship between the Gothic and
Sensibility, in particular, is one that has not yet been fully explored. Another confounding element in discussions of Sensibility in England and beyond is its relation to
sentimentalism. Sensibility became a dominant aspect of Pre-Romanticism, distinguishing itself from sentimentalism (a much broader term) in its combination of
assumptions about human psychology and anatomy. Again, it is not possible here to
distinguish between these many Pre-Romantic cousins, but instead this essay will focus
on Sensibility, primarily in the English novel of 1740-90, but also as Sensibility is
manifested in French sensibilité and German Storm and Stress.
However one refers to or defines the dominant European literary taste of 1740-90,
the literature of this period has not fared equally well at the hand of critics. Marilyn
Butler, for example, calls Sensibility a ‘‘weak trial run for Romanticism’’ (Butler 1982:
29). While definition through hindsight has a long tradition, including the term
‘‘Middle Ages,’’ yet even if it is true that Pre-Romanticism ‘‘preceded and anticipated
Romanticism,’’ as Gary Kelly (2004: 904) writes, can one not say that any period
which precedes generally also anticipates subsequent periods? We can certainly find
anticipation of Romantic literary notions and style as early as Plato, Montaigne, or
Cervantes, if we choose to call them anticipation. Charles Rosen (1995), for example,
12
Inger S. B. Brodey
cites many seventeenth-century analogues to Pre-Romantic traits in music. In French
literature, Lafayette, Racine, and Scudéry all bear resemblances to the sentimental
impulses of pre-Romantic literature, or to the literature of sensibilité.
Generally the term pre-Romanticism is vaguely derogatory and associated with
pseudo-Romanticism, suggesting inferior content, or a period not worthy of the name
of what succeeded and surpassed it: ‘‘a trough between two creative waves’’ (D.
J. Enright 1957: 391-2) or the ‘‘the swamps between the Augustan and Romantic
heights’’ (Todd 1986: 142). I would argue, however, that if the period is ‘‘swamplike,’’
this is due to a lack of definite boundaries rather than a lack of brilliance or historical
significance. Geographically disparate and lacking a manifesto or concrete set of goals,
the culture of Sensibility may indeed seem overly amorphous: Northrop Frye’s term
‘‘the Age of Sensibility’’ seems to oversimplify the issues of periodicization. Many
scholars have used terms like the Culture of Sensibility, the Cult of Sensibility, or
simply spoken of Sensibility as a movement. More recently, several cultural historians
have come to see Sensibility as ‘‘the specifically cultural aspect or expression of a
broad, late-eighteenth-century movement for social, economic, or political reform,
linked to both the Enlightenment and Romanticism but distinct from them’’ (Kelly
2004: 904-5).
This is however not a new opinion: scholars as varied as Arthur Lovejoy, Erwin
Panofsky, Christopher Hussey, M. H. Abrams, Martin Battestin, Michel Foucault, and
Charles Taylor have all located a highly significant, aesthetic and philosophical
watershed at the midpoint of the eighteenth century across Britain and continental
Europe. Although the interpretations of this shift vary, they all describe the movement away from Augustan and neoclassical symmetry and order towards a new
interest in asymmetry and irregularity. In the aesthetic terms of Edmund Burke, or
of landscape gardening, Sensibility is involved more with the serpentine curves and
studied irregularity of the picturesque than with the awe-inspiring and precipitous
sublime: it is not yet opening up the realm of the monstrous, characteristic of
Romanticism per se.2 For the purposes of this essay, I will use the term Sensibility
rather than pre-Romanticism because it treats the literary, aesthetic, and philosophical
developments as important in their own right rather than as premonition of future
developments. Without trying to claim that Sensibility is a distinct period (since
periodicization is fraught with danger and absurdity), I will instead attempt to show
that Sensibility, as a geographically disparate but temporally fairly coherent movement, provides a convenient way of understanding the cluster of transitions that
occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain as well as most of
Central and Northern Europe.
These five decades are a crucial turning point in such diverse fields as political
philosophy, natural science, epistemology, theology, aesthetics, and moral philosophy;
it witnessed great changes in general attitudes towards privacy, nature, subjectivity,
language, and the self. While it will not be part of the goal here to establish causality,
or to establish which discipline first influenced others, we will turn to certain of these
developments to help explain the fundamental assumptions shared by most of the
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
13
authors involved in the literature of Sensibility. We will pay particular attention to
the ways in which the authors of Sensibility were consciously distinguishing themselves from their literary and philosophical predecessors, regardless of underlying,
persistent family resemblances.
On Sensibility and its Traits
Within the literature of Sensibility, the dominant genres tended to be poetry, drama,
and especially the novel. Novels also began to change in form, as the tendencies grew
in Germany, France, and England towards first-person narratives, fictional letters or
memoirs, self-conscious narrators, and content with a deeper psychological edge.
The increased use of the self-conscious narrator is particularly significant for
understanding the growing self-reflexivity and concerns about the difficulties of
self-representation that helped shape narrative techniques of the literature of Sensibility. Representative novelists include Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte
and Henry Brooke, Charlotte Smith, Frances Sheridan, and Mary Wollstonecraft in
England and Scotland; Johann W. Goethe, Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter),
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wilhelm Heinse, and Karl Philipp Moritz in Germany; and JeanJacques Rousseau, l’abbé Prévost, Jean-François Marmontel, and Bernardin de St
Pierre in France. If it is true that from the 1740s to the 1770s, the Culture of
Sensibility was predominantly shaped by the novel of the time, then it is also the case
that it was largely shaped by foreign novels in translation. In the recent Encyclopedia of
the Romantic Era, for example, Gary Kelly (2004) argues that it was the translation
into English of Rousseau, Prévost, and St Pierre (among others) that spurred Sensibility in England, while Robert J. Frail (2004) argues that it was the translation of
Defoe and Richardson (along with the poets Thomson and Young) into French that
spurred Pre-Romanticism in France. In fact, as French ‘‘Anglomania’’ intensified after
1750, English novels appeared by the hundreds and such frenchified English novels
were often called ‘‘le genre triste’’ (Frail 2004: 907).3 As novels of Sensibility swept
Europe in the 1760s and 1770s at the height of the movement, Werther became a
household name in England, and Clarissa and Yorick became familiar presences in
both Germany and England.
The developments in the novel relate to concurrent trends in moral philosophy,
philosophy of language, and aesthetics; together, these trends describe an interesting
and pervasive mode of thought that flourished during this critical period. The rise of
empiricism, the growing distrust of unaided reason, the elevation of the passions –
especially as guides to moral behavior – a new faith in the natural goodness of
humankind, and increasing emphasis on the faculties of sympathy and imagination,
combined to shape the drastically new moral self which accompanied Sensibility. At
the same time, one can detect a peculiar skepticism concerning language – a growing
distrust of the referential and communicative powers of language, so that words no
longer are the trustworthy allies of either reason or emotion.
14
Inger S. B. Brodey
To summarize, there are six clusters of ideas that seem to be most characteristic of
the culture of Sensibility, influencing its literary styles and content: (1) ethical
thought that stressed the significance of feeling over reason for moral behavior,
resulting in a new psychology that stressed the ethical, didactic, and emotional effect
of the faculty of sight; (2) scientific theories that stressed the biological basis of
emotion and sympathy; (3) an emphasis on the importance of independence from
authority, whether construed in political, cultural, religious, or aesthetic terms; (4) a
consistent preference for rural simplicity over urbanity; (5) intense concern over the
possibility of human intimacy and effective (affective) communication, especially as
an antidote to solipsism; and, finally, (6) a deep ambivalence about the desirability of
order and system. The second of these traits could be seen as a continuation of
Enlightenment or neoclassical rationalism and love of system, and the last two ideas
tend to lessen in subsequent decades with the transition to Romanticism, whereas
items 1, 3, and 4 do not in isolation distinguish Sensibility from Romanticism.
Moral Sentiments and Virtue-breeding Visions
One of the most infamous hallmarks of the literature of Sensibility is the prevalence of
lachrymose outbursts, such as those that fill the pages of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man
of Feeling or Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Generally the protagonist is a
‘‘sensitive soul’’ or ‘‘man of feeling’’ who is placed in conflict with either ‘‘men of the
world,’’ who think of worldly gain, or the prototypical Enlightenment ‘‘man of
letters’’ who argues with great faith in reason, but little heart. Unlike protagonists
of many other periods, the man of feeling is judged by the degree to which his soul is
moved by sights and tales of virtue and suffering. To some extent his virtue is proved
by his weakness in other traditional roles: he possesses neither public authority, nor
martial skill, nor conventional heroic strength of will. Regardless of whether male or
female, the protagonists of Sensibility reject reason as a guide to moral behavior;
instead their authors show that sympathy and their pure hearts are less fallible guides
to moral behavior. The sympathy which these characters readily feel and display is
often stimulated by a tableau of virtue in distress. Novels of Sensibility are sprinkled
generously with such visual tales and tableaux of suffering to serve as stimuli for the
virtuous feelings of protagonist and reader alike.
In direct opposition to classical and Augustan thought, feeling takes the place of
reason as the supreme human faculty; feeling rather than reason now provided the
only hope of community within the tenets of Sensibility. Whereas Enlightenment or
neoclassical thought required vision for the perception of a rational, eternal order,
Sensibility’s use of sight tends towards affect – especially the possibility of sympathy
evoked by visions of suffering. This also differs from its use in Romantic thought,
where, just as the emphasis in poetic imagery is often on night rather than day, the
‘‘inner eye,’’ or what the imagination ‘‘sees’’ often seems more significant than what
the eye could witness in daylight.
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
15
Already in late seventeenth-century England, Locke had begun to pave the way for
these developing ideas about reason. When Locke asks the crucial question in his An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding: ‘‘Whence has [the mind] all the materials of
Reason and Knowledge?’’ his response is especially illuminating:
To this I answer, in one word, From EXPERIENCE: In that, all our Knowledge is
founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self. Our Observation employ’d either
about external, sensible Objects; or about the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and
reflected on by our selves, is that, which supplies our Understandings with all the materials of
thinking. (Locke 1975: 104, my emphasis)
Locke’s division of ‘‘EXPERIENCE’’ into ‘‘Observation’’ of both ‘‘external, sensible
Objects’’ and ‘‘internal Operations of our Minds’’ draws a strong connection between
‘‘SENSATION’’ and ‘‘REFLECTION’’ (Locke 1975: 105). In doing so, he establishes
to an unprecedented degree the importance of the senses and the passions to the
process of ‘‘thinking.’’ The sensations and passions do not themselves rule thought or
reason, but they come first in the process and provide thought with its fodder.
Without them we are incapable of thought.4
The third Earl of Shaftesbury, often taken as the official philosopher of Sensibility,
carried the displacement of reason by feeling several steps further, as he began to
substitute an ‘‘ethics of feeling’’ for the dominant ‘‘ethics of rationalism.’’ Shaftesbury
aestheticized morality to an unusual degree:
To philosophise, . . . is but to carry good-breeding a step higher, for the accomplishment
of good breeding is, to learn whatever is decent in company or beautiful in arts; and the
sum of philosophy is, to learn what is just in society and beautiful in Nature and the
order of the world. (Shaftesbury 1900, II: 255)
He was confident that human beings could achieve both virtue and happiness by
harmonizing their passions and by cultivating the delicacy and aristocratic nobility of
‘‘taste.’’5 Compared to taste, other faculties like judgment, unaided reason, and
conscience based on discipline were powerless: ‘‘After all,’’ he wrote, ‘‘’tis not merely
what we call principle, but . . . taste that governs men. . . . Even conscience, I fear, such
as is owing to religious discipline, will make but a slight figure where this taste is set
amiss’’ (Shaftesbury 1900, II: 265).6
Hume, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, following Shaftesbury, all carefully excluded
unaided reason from their discussion of virtue; they achieved this by displaying the
inherent weakness of unaided reason and by taking additional steps to raise the
passions to an exalted status previously held exclusively by reason. Hume, for
example, wrote that ‘‘I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be
a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the
direction of the will’’ (Hume 1978: 413). By this Hume does not mean that reason is
insignificant in our actions, but instead that it does not have the psychological power
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Inger S. B. Brodey
of passion. Only passion can oppose passion, just as ‘‘morality. . . is more properly felt
than judg’d of’’ (1978: 470). Law, reason, and discipline cannot move us to virtue;
only such virtuous passions as sympathy and benevolence can do so: ‘‘Our sense of duty
always follows the common and natural course of our passions’’ (p. 484). The most
shocking aspect of Hume’s philosophy in this regard was not so much his claim that
reason generally does not control the passions, but his refusal to accept the idea that
reason should (Lovejoy 1961: 181).
The word ‘‘sentiment’’ became a vehicle for the synthesis of reason and emotion
which proved key to moral philosophers such as Hume and Smith and separated them
from Shaftesbury: for these mid-century philosophers, ‘‘sentiment’’ denoted intellectualized emotion or emotionalized thought. Thus, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Smith could speak of, for example, the ‘‘heart’’ rather than the mind of the impartial
spectator judging our actions, and also of ‘‘our hearts [having to] adopt the principles
of the agent’’ (Smith 1982: 39, my emphasis). Over and over again Smith
attributes traditionally rational functions, such as judging and adopting principles,
to the tender heart of the spectator. Thus the rise in moral authority that the
passions had gained by this time showed itself in the changing meaning of the
word ‘‘sentiment.’’
When reason loses its moral authority and becomes less normative, ‘‘sentiment,’’
that curious combination of emotion, reason, and sensation, rises to take its place as
the representative of our natural and normative inner self. Along with this changing
notion of the self follows a new perception of our position within nature and nature
within us. Taylor calls this change the ‘‘Deist shift’’:
For the ancients, nature offers us an order which moves us to love and instantiate it,
unless we are depraved. But the modern view, on the other hand, endorses nature as the
source of right impulse or sentiment. So we encounter nature . . . , not in a vision of
order, but in experiencing the right inner impulse. (Taylor 1989: 284)
Whereas for Aristotle, for example, the goal is for phronèsis to guide the passions
according to an understanding of the good, this modern view differs radically in that
there is no hierarchical order to apprehend or apply (Taylor 1989: 283-4). Instead, the
moral agent needs to look inside to gauge his or her own ‘‘inner impulses’’; no
disengaged reason, no other voice is necessary – simply the promptings of one’s
own sensible heart.
As the literature of Sensibility flourished, the ethics of feeling continued to
dominate, as evidenced by the emphasis on intense friendship or ardent romantic
love as indicators of the ability to feel, and continued emphasis on expressivism and
using narrative techniques to affect emotion in the audience. While the Augustan
tendency towards didacticism did not fade fully in England until the nineteenth
century, the nature of didactic lessons changed, and authors manipulated readers’
emotional responses in order to achieve a sentimental education of the audience,
presumed immune to the effects of direct argumentation.
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
17
Sensible Bodies, Sensitive Nerves
If vision loomed large as a sense that enabled the sensitive soul to sympathize with
others, then the nerves figured even more prominently as the conveyors of emotion
within the sensitive soul’s anatomy. Potential for virtue, in other words, seems to have
been proportionate to the functioning of one’s nervous system. Preoccupation with
bodily mechanisms of emotion and experience stem from the Enlightenment materialist epistemology described above, and much discourse in philosophy and natural
science was devoted to finding the biological basis of emotion, particularly as located
in the nerves and senses. Thus the new psychology that stressed the ethical, didactic,
and emotional effect of the faculty of sight rests upon the foundation of the sensory
origin of ideas, first made popular by John Locke, and propagated in literature
through the works of Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The definition of ‘‘Sensibilité (morale)’’ from Diderot’s Encyclopédie illustrates well
what was comprised in this new ideal:
Tender and delicate disposition of the soul which renders it easy to be moved and
touched. Sensibility of soul, which is rightly described as the source of morality, gives
one a kind of wisdom concerning matters of virtue and is far more penetrating than the
intellect alone. People of sensibility because of their liveliness can fall into errors which
Men of the world would not commit; but these are greatly outweighed by the amount of
good that they do. Men of sensibility live more fully than others. . . . Reflection can
produce a man of probity: but sensibility is the mother of humanity, of generosity; it is
at the service of merit, lends its support to the intellect, and is the moving spirit which
animates belief. (my translation)
However, it is remarkable to students today that Diderot felt the need to include
separate ‘‘medical’’ and ‘‘philosophical’’ entries for Sensibility in his Encyclopédie (175165). Here is a brief excerpt from the medical entry written by a natural scientist: ‘‘the
faculty of sensing, the cause of feeling, or feeling itself in the organs of the body,
the basis of life and what assures its continuance, animality par excellence, the finest, the
most singular phenomenon of nature.’’
Poetry eulogizing Sensibility also often emphasized its physical origins in the
tingling nerves and fibers of the human body:
Hail, sacred source of sympathies divine,
Each social pulse, each social fiber thine;
Hail, symbols of the God to whom we owe
The nerves that vibrate, and the hearts that glow.
The above excerpt from Samuel Jackson Pratt’s poem Sympathy (1781), shows a
common conception that the physical impulses of sensibility are imbedded in
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Inger S. B. Brodey
human nature by God, and are the key to sociability and fellow-feeling. Frances
Brooke, in her sentimental novel Emily Montague (1769), also displays the intimate
connection between Sensibility’s psychology and its ethics: women do not achieve
religion and virtue through ‘‘principles found on reason and argument’’ but instead
through ‘‘elegance of mind, delicacy of moral taste, and a certain quick perception of
the beautiful and becoming in everything’’ (Brooke 1985: 107).
‘‘Sensibility,’’ a word that was quite rare until the middle of the century, took on
multiple meanings including ‘‘perceptibility by the senses, the readiness of an organ
to respond to sensory stimuli, mental perception, the power of the emotions, heightened emotional consciousness, and quickness of feeling’’ (Hagstrum 1980: 9).7 This
keen response could be stimulated by either beauty or suffering: in other words,
‘‘sensibility’’ took over not only aesthetic terrain but also the moral terrain of ‘‘what
would once have been called charity’’ (Lewis 1967: 159). As ‘‘sympathy’’ and ‘‘sensibility’’ replace ‘‘charity,’’ the emotions in the ‘‘sensible’’ spectator become more
important than any actions that this virtuous observer may take to alleviate suffering.
Personality and spontaneous, overflowing feeling replaced character, plans, discipline,
and, eventually, action; nerves and glands came to bear greater ethical significance
than muscles. This crucial shift in ethics and aesthetics affected the protagonists of
Sensibility.
‘‘[F]ar more penetrating than the intellect alone,’’ Sensibility’s ideal portrays the
dramatic fall of unaided or ‘‘disengaged’’ reason that we have described above.
Reflection no longer has direct contact with the will, and the passions and nerves
carry more potent (eventually even more accurate) information than reasoning. Mary
Wollstonecraft describes Sensibility as ‘‘the result of acute senses, finely-fashioned
nerves, which vibrate at the slightest touch, and convey such clear intelligence to the
brain, that it does not require to be arranged by the judgment.’’8 As the passions grow
reasonable and even moral, the need arises to cultivate rather than suppress them. We
have seen the effects of this trend in the pedagogy of seeing and feeling emphasized
both in landscape gardening and the sentimental novel. Sensibility’s moral psychology brought with it an emphasis on receptivity or sensitivity to external behavior
and sights, whether the landscape garden, the Alps, or the sight of human suffering at
home. In short, ‘‘sensibility,’’ a word which has largely disappeared from our vocabulary today, and when used means little more than ‘‘emotional viewpoint,’’ had a
glorious past. During this half century, it meant little less than the essential spark
of life, virtue, and humanity.
Natural Goodness, Originality, and the Rustic Soul
The words ‘‘sentiment’’ and ‘‘sensibility’’ provide a bridge between the epistemological,
linguistic, and ethical issues of the period. The multiple meanings of the
word ‘‘sensible,’’ in fact, helped contribute to the mid-century rise in an optimistic
conception of natural human goodness. Both the terms ‘‘sentimental’’ and ‘‘sensibility’’
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
19
show a significant and unprecedented ability to bundle reason, passion, and virtue into
one tidy package. The peculiar confluence of two of the main meanings of the word
‘‘sensible’’ – that is, the minimalist (1) ‘‘conscious . . . aware’’ and the rarified (2) ‘‘having
sensibility; capable of delicate or tender feeling’’ – enables the creation of a naturally
virtuous hero or heroine and expresses the potential for great optimism by suggesting
that virtue is as natural to us as sensing or waking.9 Inherent in such easy access to
virtue is, however, also the possibility for great disappointment. For if virtue is so
natural, how does one explain its (very frequent) absence? Eighteenth-century writers
therefore sought for new guides to moral behavior, since they observed that reason and
virtue, as traditionally understood in classical or Christian terms, did not seem to be
doing the job. This combination of euphoric optimism and great fear or pessimism is a
pervasive feature of Sensibility.
Somewhat oddly, it was a mid-seventeenth-century philosopher, long since dead,
who figured most prominently as the philosophical opposition for Sensibility. Explicitly or implicitly, the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan (1660) fueled the
culture of Sensibility; philosophers and other authors united in the desire to prove
him wrong about the inescapably selfish nature of human beings. While philosophers
in the common sense school struggled to lower the threshold for natural virtue, for
example, novelists of Sensibility sought to illustrate examples of the untaught nature
of virtue, and attention was drawn to the anthropological discoveries of the ‘‘noble
savage’’ in the voyages of Captains Cook and Bougainville, among others. Two of the
ways in which this attention to natural goodness figures prominently in the hallmarks
of the literature of Sensibility are the consistent preference for rural simplicity over
urbanity and the importance placed on independence from institutional authorities.
Sensibility coincides with a dramatic rise in folklore movements across Europe and
Britain. Across the genres of literature, one can see a growing emphasis on nature,
natural simplicity, the ordinary, everyday rustic life, and also kindness to animals. The
new moral aesthetic left no room for more urban forms of virtue: urbane sophistication was untrustworthy; erudition was formed for abuse; civility was another form of
dishonesty; and those with education were seen as most skilled in deception. Three
works – in the French-speaking world, Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements
de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755); in England, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry (1765); and in Germany, Herder’s Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1773) –
were especially significant in building a vogue for folk culture and folk literature.
Some authors, most notably James Macpherson in his Poems of Ossian (1760-63), were
so eager to include examples of ancient, untrained, natural simplicity and virtue that
the authors resorted to forgery in order to claim the historical authenticity of the texts
and the protagonists, while others took to the fields to find poems written by talented
milkmaids. The pursuit of natural goodness, and the desire to prove Hobbes wrong,
also spurred an emphasis on the importance of originality or independence from
authority and traditional institutions. Depending on the individual authors, this was
construed in either political, aesthetic, cultural, or religious terms. Authors stressed
the inadequacies of old hierarchies, praised a reliance on self-taught knowledge,
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Inger S. B. Brodey
promoted skeptical irreverence towards theories and institutions. In French literature,
this often took the form of freedom from Classicism and its rigid aesthetic rules, as
well as from traditional religious and social constraints. In Germany, it could be seen,
for example, in the growing popularity of Pietism, a brand of Protestantism that
emphasizes spiritual intensity and direct communication with a personal deity in
preference to mediation by institutions and clergy. These reformist or oppositional
aspects of Sensibility have led many authors to place Sensibility in the camp of French
revolutionaries.10
Each in a different context, Edward Young, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann W.
Goethe, all wrote about the importance of originality and the corrupting and
diminishing effects of society, draining individuals of their authenticity. In his
Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), Rousseau complains of the homogenizing
effect of society upon our passions:
Before art had shaped our manners and taught our passions to speak an artificial
language, our customs were rustic but natural; . . . Today, more subtle study and a
more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to a system; a vile and misleading
uniformity prevails in our manners, so that one would think all minds had been cast in
the same mold. Unremittingly, politeness requires this; decorum legislates that; unceasingly we follow these forms rather than our own genius. (Rousseau 1971a: 54, my
translation)
Nine years later, in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young
similarly complains of the contemporary lack of originality in a society that seems
to require uniformity: ‘‘Born Originals how does it come to pass that we die Copies!’’
(1759: 42). With a memorable line that could almost be a paraphrasing of Young’s
credo, Rousseau opens his Social Contract ([1762] 1971b): ‘‘Man was born free, but is
everywhere in chains.’’ And in his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Goethe’s eponymous
protagonist shows fictionally the fate of those who try to remain authentic originals
despite the pressure of society to conform to regulations and homogenizing expectations, whether in terms of social conventions or ethical standards: his struggles bring
him to the brink of madness and, ultimately, to suicide. Reason, established etiquette,
logic, self-conscious moderation, and mathematical proportion eventually came to be
seen by devotees of Sensibility as enemies of the ‘‘right inner impulse’’ which would
only be quenched or diffused by such censorship.
One of the primary features of the ‘‘mental habit’’ of Sensibility seems to have been
an assumption (or fear) of the impossibility of the coexistence of authority, authentic
feeling, and virtue in any given individual, as well as doubt as to whether virtuous
people can conform their expressions to the political and social conventions of society
without sacrificing their own authenticity and, therefore, virtue. In other words,
despite the moral sense school’s attempts to portray virtue as increasingly natural and
accessible, virtue actually became rarer, in a sense, as the culture of Sensibility
progressed. The rarity or scarcity of virtue and authentic feeling was denoted in a
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
21
number of ways, including the drive to look further and further afield for its
exemplars. Finally we end up with an ironic return to a universe that seems strikingly
Hobbesian, as the ‘‘sensitive soul’’ or ‘‘man of feeling’’ becomes increasingly rare and
embattled.11 Authors of novels of Sensibility thus felt pressure to portray heroes who
were also victims of society – Shaftesburian souls, forlorn in a Hobbesian universe.
The Language of Feeling
As inheritors of John Locke’s disturbing epistemological findings, and lacking a
concomitant moral confidence in the duty to organize and categorize and speak,
authors of the culture of Sensibility grew painfully aware of the limitations of both
the representative and communicative powers of language. Given its own ambivalent
attitude towards words and definition and its consciousness of the difficulties of selfrepresentation, perhaps it would only be appropriate that this disputed period remain
nameless. As Laurence Sterne warns, through the voice of Tristram Shandy, ‘‘to define
is to distrust’’; however, to speak is, inevitably, to generalize.
Just as reason was under heavy fire in the second half of the eighteenth century,
language was as well: language’s referential and communicative powers, the possibility of objectivity for the human mind, and the possibility of translation were all topics
that spurred heated intellectual debate among such major figures as Locke, Shaftesbury, Diderot, Hume, and Smith. Diderot, Rousseau, and Herder showed that by
allowing feelings to be passed through the ordering, but stultifying, funnel of
discourse, we lose the authenticity of the instantaneous ‘‘flash’’ of feeling. Thus the
culture of Sensibility sought to represent through gestures, visual art, and fragmentation what could no longer be articulated through syntactic completion and with a
reliance on logic or discursive reason.
Out of these movements in philosophy, linguistics, and aesthetics emerges a new
character. Shaftesbury’s gentleman of taste; Hume and Smith’s man of sympathy or
moral sentiments; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot’s noble savage; Mackenzie’s man of
feeling; Sterne’s sentimental traveler, and Goethe’s Werther, all share the essential
attributes of the hero of Sensibility: unspoiled natural virtue, an unusually keen
perception, and a deep capacity to feel.12 In addition, all of the fictional heroes and
heroines from Diderot to Goethe share great difficulty expressing their deep, naturally
virtuous feelings in the conventional language of society. In fact, their difficulty
speaking becomes a measure of their sensibility: in being men of feeling, they are
explicitly not men of words.
The intense concern over the (im)possibility of human intimacy and communication, was exacerbated by concern over human tendencies towards solipsism, so
effectively illustrated by Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy. Solipsism, in fact,
became such a hallmark of Sensibility that Keats and Hazlitt both denigrated
Sensibility’s purposeless and solipsistic self-consciousness. In a philosophical dispute
that, in effect, resembled a linguistic corollary to the dispute over Hobbes and natural
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Inger S. B. Brodey
goodness, authors were torn between the demand for intense self-consciousness and
awareness of the dangers of solipsism, between self and society. For novelists of
Sensibility this formed not only an intriguing philosophical problem, but also an
opportunity to exercise new narrative techniques, particularly following the eccentricities of Sterne. First-person, self-conscious narrators became much more common,
largely through the work of Sterne, Tieck, and Diderot, and authors generally
experimented with the self-conscious mediation of sentiment via language. A ‘‘rhetoric of silence’’ resulted from this desire to represent what could no longer be
articulated directly – that is, to preserve natural expression uncensored by the
authority of words, logic, grammar, and closure.
The Architecture of the Novel of Sensibility
As we have seen from these excerpts of philosophy and psychology from the second
half of the eighteenth century, aspects of human nature that had previously been
considered unruly and disorderly rose to distinction, as the passions grew to displace
reason as the more trusted guides to moral behavior. The irregular, the fragmented,
the unintended, the unruly, the nervous, the hysterical – tokens of human depravity to
neoclassical eyes – became not only aesthetically desirable, but morally superior to
regularity, completion, and order. Artists of Sensibility were thus in a paradoxical
position of having to pursue and ‘‘compose’’ decay, ruination, and irregularity in order
to capture authentic feeling. In the case of novels of Sensibility, authenticity and
artifice, disorder and order are intricately interwoven. When, as in the case of
Sensibility’s aesthetic code, authenticity is equated with disorder, and artifice with
order, authors must respond by combining structure with the pointed avoidance of
structure in order to articulate their story and evoke the proper emotions in the reader.
Authors in mid-to-late eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany, writing
novels of Sensibility, in other words, responded to the same aesthetic and cultural
demands as the architects of the follies, the artificial architectural ruins that became
popular across Europe alongside Sensibility.
Just as scenes of pathos, depictions of unqualified virtue, promotion of subjective
responses in the reader, and tableaux of emotionally laden situations became commonplace hallmarks of the novel of Sensibility, the six ideas developed above led to
the need for new narrative strategies. For example, the aesthetic associated with
Sensibility demanded of its literature that those who speak well cannot possibly
feel, and those who feel most deeply invariably stammer and fragment their speech;
in other words, according to Sensibility’s moral and aesthetic code, eloquence had
become a moral indicator of hypocrisy or heartlessness. Responding to these challenges, authors such as Laurence Sterne, Johann W. Goethe, and Henry Mackenzie
developed a new strategy: they constructed purposely fragmented novels with elaborate narrative frames that could divide the responsibility for authorship among the
characters and thereby allow the protagonists to tell their own stories without
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
23
seeming to organize them, protecting them from accusations of coldness or insensibility. They succeeded in hiding their role as ‘‘men of words’’ in order to protect their
status as ‘‘men of feeling.’’ As a result, the five decades of Sensibility witnessed strong
innovations in the form of the novel, particularly its narrative techniques.
The novel was a natural locus for issues central to Sensibility, because of the
conflicts over narration and the difficulties of self-representation. In other words,
the growing distrust of reason discussed above also corresponded to a distrust of
omniscient narration, which gradually grew incompatible with sensibility. A narrator
who was not self-conscious, and therefore not a participant in the action and feelings of
the novel, could be seen as anonymous, heartless, and bringing a random imposition
of the author’s authority. Only spontaneous speech, ‘‘uncensored’’ by strict grammatical rules and ‘‘untainted’’ by practical purpose or preconceived plans, could count as
authentic or sincere. Traditional narrative was equated with cold-hearted rationality
and worldliness, especially if the narrative is explicitly written as a final product, with
the intent of publication.
Both Sterne and Goethe use an intruding narrator to create an additional frame
of authorship in their texts and to protect themselves and their protagonists from the
taint of coherent narrative and from accusations of such base practicality. In
A Sentimental Journey, Yorick is the narrator as well as the central character in his
travels; in Werther, Werther also narrates his own story – this time, in the form of
letters. Goethe provides a self-conscious narrator, the Herausgeber, who acts as editor
and compiler of Werther’s letters. The Herausgeber forms a second narrative frame,
especially noticeable since his is the first and last voice of the text. All three of these
narrators contribute to the fragmentary nature of the narrative because they are selfconscious about their writing and the difficulties associated with producing an
organized, unified text. These complicated linguistic and narratorial requirements
were not limited to these two novels, but instead exhibit responses to Sensibility’s
central concerns as enumerated above. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the third
in the triumvirate of most popular novels of Sensibility, appeared in 1771, three years
after A Sentimental Journey, and three years before Werther. Mackenzie borrows many
techniques from Sterne and his innovations foreshadow Goethe’s Werther as well.
Mackenzie’s combination of themes and narrative techniques used by Sterne and
Goethe will further illustrate the ideas associated with these techniques. By transferring authorship and authority to their self-conscious narrators, Sterne, Mackenzie, and
Goethe attempt to bridge the gap between men of feeling and men of words. The
fragmentation and chaotic elements of the novels can therefore be attributed to the
narrator agents, while the authors themselves can still maintain an invisible control
over, and mastery of, the text.
In The Man of Feeling Mackenzie’s decision to leave the narrating of Harley’s story to
others is precisely not a return to an authoritative narrator, such as the one in
Fielding’s Tom Jones; instead, Mackenzie goes to great lengths to undermine any
appearance of order, control, or objective detachment on the part of his narrators.
Mackenzie’s novel uses no fewer than three narratorial frames to mask the authorship
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Inger S. B. Brodey
of those whom it seeks to portray as ‘‘men of feeling.’’ Just like Goethe’s Werther, it has
multiple narrators, only Mackenzie uses three layers of editors who account for its
fragmentation as well as its order.
Upon examination, we can see that each of the three central voices in this novel –
the three central ‘‘I’’s – represents a separate ‘‘feeling heart’’ through its fragmentation.
Although Harley does not narrate his own story, the narrators transcribe his spoken
words and (somewhat unaccountably) his private thoughts at great length. Mackenzie
shows his response to the demands of the culture of Sensibility by sacrificing
authenticity in plot, at such times, for the sake of authenticity of emotion: it is
more important that Harley not be a man of words, than that the reader understands
how the narrator could possibly have known his feelings. On a rare occasion, Harley
does write of his (unproclaimed) love: in Chapter XL, we find a pastoral poem that
Harley has laboriously written; however, he promptly uses it to lift a hot tea kettle,
and forgetfully leaves it on the handle. The narrator, Charles, finds it there, and later
records: ‘‘I happened to put it in my pocket by a similar act of forgetfulness’’
(Mackenzie 1987: 113). It is clear that Mackenzie will go to great, and almost
comic, lengths to stress the unpremeditated nature of these men’s actions; therefore,
their status as men of feeling cannot be sullied with imputations of ‘‘rational’’ or
‘‘artificial’’ motives. The narrator-participant Charles must not think of himself as
narrator during the time frame that his narration depicts, lest the reader find him
cold, hypocritical, or untrustworthy. Thus, somewhat ironically, he must display a
lack of foresight in order to gain the ‘‘sensible’’ reader’s trust. Charles (we learn his
name on the last page), repeatedly evinces traditional narratorial omniscience, but this
omniscience is masked by his personal subjectivity: Charles loves Harley, and his great
affection for him prevents him (according to his own account) from presenting the
narrative in an orderly fashion.
Many of the major gaps and silences in the narrative, however, stem from neither
Charles’s delicate sensibility nor Harley’s distrust of words: instead their source is on
another plane of narrative altogether. They are the result of the actions of ‘‘the
unfeeling curate’’ who, as we learn in the introduction, finding Charles’s story
worthless (‘‘the hand is intolerably bad, I could never find the author in one strain
for two chapters together: and I don’t believe there’s a single syllogism from beginning to end’’), has used Charles’s story as wadding for his rifle when he hunts
(Mackenzie 1987: 5). Of course, the curate’s objections to the narrative style reveal
precisely the story’s worth in terms of sensibility: a strong hand would betoken a cold
heart, and more adherence to story or plot would signify insincerity. The curate’s
mangling of the document, forming the third narrative frame for the story, is the
palpable reason the novel begins with ‘‘Chapter XI’’ and has chapter headings such as
‘‘The Fragment,’’ yet the narrative gaps of the manuscript actually function as gaping
wounds inflicted by a Hobbesian society upon the sensitive Shaftesburian soul.
In one sense, the multiple narrative frames of the novel of Sensibility have one
simple goal: repeated deferral of responsibility for authorship (or passing the buck, if
you will) from author to fictional editors as well as from protagonist to fictional
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
25
editors. The greater the number of individuals (fictitious or not) whose sensibility and
authenticity needed to be protected as well as portrayed, the greater the number of
editorial frames the works required. This may give us another way of understanding
the appeal of translated novels to the culture of Sensibility. When works were
translated into a new language, the original author occasionally became a new natural
hero or heroine of Sensibility; a new editorial frame was added in the course of the new
translation or edition of the work, claiming how the translator discovered this
exquisite gem that would otherwise have been overlooked by the unfeeling populace
at large. In other words, the effect of translation was not only thematically appropriate, but it also added another archaeological layer to the complex narrative strategies
preferred by readers during the five decades when Sensibility flourished.
Defining Ambivalence
Throughout this essay, I have suggested central ambivalences or tensions within the
ideas that helped shape the novel of Sensibility. It may be that such fundamental
ambivalence, or simultaneous optimism and pessimism, is one of the most important
hallmarks of Sensibility – at the same time, it is also a token of the movement’s
instability and lack of coherence. In the preceding pages, we have looked at the desire
for order and system coexisting with the relish of spontaneity; the distrust of reason
argued most persuasively and rationally by philosophers; the desire for narration that
seeks to hide all traces of narrative authorship; and the insistence upon natural
goodness accessible to all, yet which is poignantly rare and fragile. In most of these
cases, Sensibility started as a reaction against Enlightenment confidence in the powers
of reason and education, but ultimately resulted in an ironic reversal, showing the
continuity of family traits by pursuing similar goals under different terms. An
example would be the continuance of didacticism, but its transformation into a
pedagogy of seeing and feeling, rather than a pedagogy of abstract reasoning.
Sensibility’s ‘‘double vision’’ consists of a persistent tension between extreme
optimism and fearful pessimism, between revolutionary fervor and nostalgic conservatism, between democratic and hierarchical impulses, between egalitarianism and
elitism, between virtue as natural and virtue as highly cultivated, between ruins and
carefully constructed buildings, between narratives and fragments. Although the
distinction is far from glamorous, Sensibility may also be distinguished from Romanticism by its heartfelt ambivalence, stemming at least from the events of the
French Revolution and subsequent Terrors, simultaneously intrepid and fearful. This
brings us back again to Hobbes, against whom the culture of Sensibility largely
defined itself. A Hobbesian understanding of human nature became necessary as a foil
or a backdrop to the unfolding of this Shaftesburian soul – the man of feeling – as
virtue in distress gradually contorted itself into the virtue of distress.
Perhaps this lends new meaning to the negative treatment Sensibility has received
at the hands of critics, particularly in relation to Romanticism. Critics frequently use
26
Inger S. B. Brodey
such terms as ‘‘half-hearted’’ or ‘‘weak’’ to describe Sensibility: just as Marilyn Butler
described sensibility as a ‘‘weak trial run for Romanticism’’ (Butler 1982: 29). D.
J. Enright once wrote that ‘‘between the self-assured work of the Augustans and the
energetic and diverse movements of the Romantic revival came a period of halfhearted, characterless writing’’ (Enright 1957: 391-2). Marshall Brown, too, describes
Pre-Romanticism as ‘‘a problem, rather than an ambition’’ (Brown 1991: 99). But is
that lack of Romantic univocalism necessarily a weakness? I would argue that
Sensibility’s double vision, hypocritical as it may seem at times, expresses a basic
human ambivalence that is at least partly an enlightened response to the events of the
French Revolution. Sensibility was an interesting experiment in attempting to
express both optimistic revolutionary fervor and conservative nostalgic concerns for
order and stability without falling into either disastrous extreme – in political terms,
avoiding both anarchy and totalitarianism. Ambivalence is not a glamorous distinction, but perhaps it is one with a wisdom of its own.
Notes
1 Interestingly, this work is also sometimes categorized under the movement ‘‘Empfindsamkeit.’’
2 This is true especially in French and English
versions of Pre-Romanticism; the German example is more complicated. The Sturm und
Drang movement was more involved in the
sublime, storms, and darker, emotional concepts than the French and English versions of
Sensibility. Although contemporaries like
Hoffman called all three composers ‘‘romantisch,’’ Mozart and Haydn can be considered
Pre-Romantic, whereas Beethoven can be
seen to represent Romanticism because he
opens up the realms of the monstrous and
immeasurable.
3 In music, representatives of Sensibility would
include Haydn and Mozart; in painting, Constable, Turner, Claude, Poussin, Greuze, and
Piranesi; and in landscape gardening, the Englishmen Repton and Whately.
4 At this point, however, we must distinguish
between the seventeenth-century Locke and
the eighteenth-century Locke: that is, we
must try to separate his own position from
the conclusions that were drawn from him
later in the eighteenth century. For Locke,
‘‘disengaged reason’’ still rules supreme and
provides the only way we gain our rightful
place in the providential order (Taylor 1989:
265): ‘‘To Locke all men are by nature rational
and God, ‘commands what reason does’’’ (Aarsleff 1982: 175). Later in the eighteenth century, Locke was, of course, considered to have
knocked the pedestal out from under Reason (a
conclusion which was not unmerited by some
of Locke’s claims), but he himself did not
consider that to be the case. (Cf. Nuttall
1974: 13-19, for a discussion of the eighteenth-century interpretations of the implicit
solipsism in Locke’s teaching, as well as
Locke’s foreshadowing of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century existentialism.) Although
elements of his thinking did indeed have the
effect of shaking the confidence in ‘‘disengaged
reason,’’ his purpose in illustrating the potential distortions of human understanding was
to protect Reason and Knowledge from abuse.
5 ‘‘Taste’’ (as well as another of his favorite
terms, ‘‘relish’’) is another term that, despite
a primary designation of aesthesis, and a physical origin, describes a process that includes
elements of both passion and thought. And
just like ‘‘sentiment’’ and ‘‘sensibility,’’ it is
endowed in the eighteenth century with
moral qualities as well. For Shaftesbury, it
did not carry the subjective meaning it does
today.
On Pre-Romanticism or Sensibility
6 Bishop Butler protested that conscience could
not survive without judgment, discipline, authority, or a standard which stood outside and
opposed itself to the individual, and suggested
that such thinking as Shaftesbury’s offered no
protection against human weakness and vice
(Bredvold 1962: 19). However, voices such as
Bishop Butler’s and Samuel Johnson’s were
outnumbered by those who had greater faith
in the ‘‘internalization’’ of virtue.
7 Lewis remarks that its most pervasively popular meaning, was ‘‘a more than ordinary degree
of responsiveness or reaction; whether this is
regarded with approval (as a sort of fineness) or
8
9
10
11
12
27
with disapproval (as excess)’’ (Lewis 1967:
159).
Quoted in Warren (1990: 31).
Definitions of ‘‘sensible’’ from Oxford English
Dictionary, 2nd edn.
For further discussion of Whig and Tory
interpretations of Sensibility, see Markman
Ellis (1996).
Brissenden also views this paradoxical situation as central to Sensibility (e.g. Brissenden
1974: 21); in fact, it is the inspiration for the
title of his book Virtue in Distress.
See Bredvold (1962: 24-5) and Brodey (1999
passim).
References and Further Reading
Aarsleff, Hans (1982). From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual
History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Bredvold, Louis I. (1962). The Natural History of
Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
Brissenden, R. F. (1974). Virtue in Distress: Studies
in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade.
New York: Barnes and Noble.
Brodey, Inger Sigrun (1999). ‘‘The Adventures of a
Female Werther: Austen’s Revision of Sensibility.’’ Philosophy and Literature 23 (1): 110-26.
Brooke, Frances (1985). The History of Emily Montague. Ottawa and Don Mills, ON: Carleton
University Press.
Brown, Marshall (1991). Preromanticism. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Burke, Edmund (1968). A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. James Boulton. Notre Dame, IN
and London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Butler, Marilyn (1982). Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background,
1760-1830. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Diderot, Denis and Robinet, Jean-Bapiste René
(1751-65). Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné
des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Paris: Briasson.
Ellis, Markman (1996). The Politics of Sensibility:
Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental
Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Ellison, Julie (1990). Delicate Subjects: Romanticism,
Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding. Ithaca,
NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Enright, D. J. (1957). ‘‘William Cowper.’’ In Boris
Ford (ed.), Pelican Guide to English Literature.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Frail, Robert J. (2004). ‘‘Pre-Romanticism,
France.’’ In Christopher John Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era: 1760-1850. New
York and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, p. 907.
Frye, Northrop (1963). ‘‘Towards Defining an
Age of Sensibility.’’ In Northrop Frye, Fables of
Identity. New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 130-7.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1989). Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers. In E. Trunz (ed.), Goethes
Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe. München: C. H.
Beck.
Hagstrum, Jean H. (1980). Sex and Sensibility:
Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hume, David (1978). A Treatise on Human Nature.
Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and
Oxford University Press.
Hussey, Christopher (1967). The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. London: Frank Cass.
Kelly, Gary (2004). ‘‘Pre-Romanticism: Britain.’’
In Christopher John Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia
of the Romantic Era: 1760-1850. New York and
London: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 904-5.
28
Inger S. B. Brodey
Lewis, C. S. (1967). Studies in Words. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, John (1975). An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1961). Reflections on Human
Nature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Mackenzie, Henry (1987). The Man of Feeling.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Nuttall, A. D. (1974). A Common Sky: Philosophy
and the Literary Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pratt, Samuel Jackson (1781). Sympathy, a Poem.
London: T. Cadell.
Riskin, Jessica (2002). Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Rosen, Charles (1995). The Romantic Generation.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1971a). ‘‘Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (First Discourse).’’ In JeanJacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Du
Seuil, pp. 52-68.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1971b). ‘‘Le Contrat social: Livre I.’’ In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres
complètes. Paris: Du Seuil, pp. 515-80.
Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of (1900). Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. London:
Grant Richards.
Smith, Adam (1982). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.
Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Todd, Janet (1986). Sensibility: An Introduction.
London and New York: Methuen.
Warren, Leland E. (1990). ‘‘The Conscious
Speakers: Sensibility and the Art of Conversation
Considered.’’ In Syndy McMillen Conger (ed.),
Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to
Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, Essays
in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum. Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 25-42.
Young, Edward (1759). Conjectures on Original Composition. In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles
Grandison. London: A. Millar and R and
J. Dodsley.
2
Shakespeare and European
Romanticism
Heike Grundmann
From Classic Unities to Natural Genius
We owe some of the best Shakespearean criticism ever written to the Romantics.
Between 1808 and 1818, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and William Hazlitt among others wrote lectures and essays that were revolutionary
and detailed at the same time, and still have not lost their freshness of insight for the
modern reader. It was on the basis of Shakespeare’s work that the Romantics inaugurated close psychological analysis (‘‘character criticism’’), and developed the study
both of the history of the stage and of the national and political setting in which a
work of art is situated. Their turning to ‘‘practical criticism,’’ a close reading of texts,
originated in the attempt to understand textual structures as ‘‘organic wholes,’’
centered and unified in a ‘‘germ’’ that had only to be laid open to give meaning to
the entire work of art. The history of modern criticism and the emergence of a new
hermeneutics became almost identical with the history of Shakespeare interpretation
throughout Romanticism.1
The need to defend Shakespeare against the disparagement he had suffered from
neo-Classicist critics such as Voltaire led to a rejection of the rules that had hitherto
been regarded as prerogatives for dramatic art: the ‘‘Aristotelian’’ unities of time,
place, and action; decorum and verisimilitude; the differentiation of (high) tragedy
and (low) comedy according to the social status of their characters. Obviously,
Shakespeare’s work ran directly contrary to these definitions of ‘‘good taste,’’ and
the generation that was in its youth at the end of the eighteenth century used him as
their battle-cry in fending off French hegemony and turning the old system of values
upside down.
Despite differences in approach, the Romantics were united in their animosity to
the totalitarianism of Napoleonic rule as well as the prescriptionism of the French
Academy. Their all-encompassing defense of Shakespeare against the strictures of neoClassicism meant that barbaric genius was reinterpreted as conscious artistry, the
30
Heike Grundmann
supernatural in his plays was given a psychological and philosophical justification, the
seemingly wild masses of mixed characters and actions in his plays were interpreted as
well-wrought structures, or else defended as a perfect mirror of a chaotic and confused
reality. His mixture of the grotesque and sublime, high and low, comic and tragic was
seen as a realistic and truthful depiction of the panorama of the world. As German
idealism permeated the spirit of the English Romantic age, reality came to be located
in the interplay of the intellectual and imaginative faculties of the mind, no longer in
a fixed external reality. The introspective and idealistic tendencies of Romanticism
found their perfect mirror image in the character of Hamlet, who was interpreted as a
paralyzed Romantic and subjected to psychoanalysis: it is the abstracting and reflecting self of the philosopher that inhibits his practical activity in the world. In the
microcosm of the continental reception of Shakespeare we can observe the struggle
between the Classic and the Romantic: the English poet became the vanguard of a
revolution of sensibility and taste that involved the discovery of the vitality of
national literature and a Rousseauistic appeal to subjective analysis and introspection.
Shakespeare gave the Romantics all they were craving for: a world that confronted
great kings with fools and destitute beggars, characters that were as inconsistent as
real human beings are, combining melancholia and obsession, madness and high
intellectuality, sublime goodness and grotesque evil – the whole gamut of experience
set against the artificial puppeteering of an anaemic Classicism.
‘‘Strong Imagination’’ – British Romanticism
Creative imagination, genius, and nature are closely associated with one another in the
beliefs of the British Romantics, and yet these tenets can be traced back well into the
eighteenth century, when writers such as Edward Young and Alexander Gerard laid
the groundwork for the Romantics by exploring the creative power of imagination
with recourse to Shakespeare.2 Even as early as in Milton’s ‘‘L’Allegro’’ Shakespeare is
‘‘fancy’s child,’’ warbling ‘‘his native wood-notes wild’’; he is the natural genius,
despite having (or because he had) only ‘‘small Latin and less Greek.’’ As neoclassical
criticism in Britain did not represent so monolithic an obstacle to the younger
generation as Voltaire represented for French Romanticism, the British Romantics
rather synthesize and refine what has gone before.3 John Dryden (1631-1700), for
example, distinguishes between art and nature, genius and learning when he refers to
Shakespeare:
All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously,
but luckily; when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those
who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation: he was
naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked
inwards and found it there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do
him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat,
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
31
insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast.
But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him. . . . (Dryden
[1668] 1962, 1: 67)
Though praise is mingled here with condemnation of his faults (bombast, triteness),
Shakespeare increasingly becomes the unquestioned hero of British cultural consciousness. In Dr Johnson’s preface to his edition of the plays, published in 1765, Shakespeare is ‘‘above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the
poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life’’ (Johnson
1968: 62). Even before the advent of Romanticism proper English neo-Classicists use
Shakespeare’s disregard of rules as an exemplum of their rejection of French insistence
on abstract codification. The demand for editions and the omnipresence of quotations
from his plays in everyday speech, as well as the success of Garrick’s productions at
Drury Lane after 1747, testify to Shakespeare’s continued supreme status as poet of the
English people. The summation of the neoclassical adherence to Shakespeare was
Garrick’s Jubilee at Stratford in 1769, which also marked the beginning of a new age
of bardolatry.4
In the aftermath of the French Revolution and its terrors, the English middle class
needed a national figure of identification. This led to the ‘‘gentrification’’ of Shakespeare, an ideological maneuver that turned a deer poacher into the prosperous
middle-class businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon, who even applied for a coat-ofarms.5 The ‘‘Tory history of England,’’ a conservative ideology of history opposed to
revolutionary change, found material proof in Shakespeare – both in the histories and
in Macbeth and King Lear. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund
Burke (1729-97) depicts the imprisonment of the French royal couple as analogous to
the night of murder in Macbeth; and in his 1805 Prelude William Wordsworth (17701850) also alludes to Macbeth when associating revolutionary atrocities with his
memories of lying awake in Paris shortly after the September massacres:
And in such way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,
To the whole city, ‘‘Sleep no more.’’ (The Prelude, Book X, lines 75-7)
This conservative backlash, which regards the liberating eradication of royal tyrants as
comparable to the regicide in Macbeth, where bad conscience cries in the murderer’s
head: ‘‘Sleep no more’’ (Macbeth II, ii, 35), is typical of the appropriation of Shakespeare by many British Romantics, who tended to forget the revolutionary fervor of
their own youth. In allusion to Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1822) famous painting, caricaturists represented the Jacobins and their sympathizers as the three witches in
Macbeth, or the rebels in the Tempest. During the war against France, Henry V was
used for nationalistic purposes, and J. P. Kemble’s historicizing and antiquarian
performances established Shakespeare as part of the national heritage. Sir Walter
Scott’s (1771-1832) novels strengthened this equation of Shakespeare with British
32
Heike Grundmann
history by using extensive intertextual references to connect his own representation of
history with Shakespeare’s. When he has the young Charles II disparage Shakespeare’s
histories (he is not willing to read Richard II) in Woodstock, he is hinting at the dangers
of ignoring the wisdom of these plays.
Liberal intellectuals like Tom Paine and William Cobbett reacted with disparagement of Shakespeare. Cobbett sees in his plays ‘‘wild and improbable fiction, bad
principles of morality and politicks, obscurity in meanings, bombastical language’’
(quoted in Schabert 2000: 621). But John Thelwall and other ‘‘Jacobin’’ critics still
searched for a possibility of identification with Shakespeare. William Hazlitt’s (17781830) Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817) shows the struggle of an admirer of
Shakespeare’s artistic achievement with his own misgivings about his assumed royalism. In his discussion of Shakespeare’s histories Hazlitt points out their advocacy of a
hierarchical state governed by the established authorities and the discrepancy between
the power relations depicted and the idea of a just order. Interpreting Coriolanus,
Hazlitt claims that Shakespeare could understand the plight of the people because of
his sympathetic nature; and yet ‘‘the language of poetry naturally falls in with the
language of power.’’ Apart from giving an analytical insight into the course of history,
great art is necessarily elitist, concludes Hazlitt.6
A much more conservative kind of criticism can be encountered in the work of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who argues for a formal, apolitical, philosophical approach. In the age of Johnson, Shakespeare was admired for his mimetic truth
to created nature (natura naturata); in that of Coleridge himself, as he writes in ‘‘On
Poesy or Art,’’ he was admired rather for his grasp of the living principle at the heart
of nature (natura naturans):
If the artist copies mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry! If he proceeds
only from a given form, which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty, what an
emptiness, what an unreality there always is in his productions, as in Cipriani’s pictures!
Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond
between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. (Coleridge 1907, 2: 257)
Coleridge adopts the ideas of A. W. Schlegel, who regarded Shakespeare’s work as the
outcome of a central synthesizing creative power in the person of the poet, and in his
Biographia Literaria (1817) calls this creative principle ‘‘imagination.’’7 Shakespeare’s
histories are explained with regard to the ‘‘germ’’ that gives unity to the matter of
history, and the discovery of this center should be the goal of Shakespeare criticism,
evading thereby ideological issues as well as Classicist demands for obedience to rules
that lie outside the work of art. Coleridge, like Schlegel, differentiates between
mechanical and organic form, and defines Shakespeare’s art as unconscious inspiration
directed by intellectual consciousness: ‘‘And even such is the appropriate excellence of
her [Nature’s] chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a
genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom
deeper than consciousness’’ (Coleridge 1960, 1: 198). Whereas Johnson defined
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
33
Shakespeare as a genius unconscious of his powers, the bard is now regarded as a
conscious artist who works according to an organic principle that is yet deeper than
consciousness.
Following his own theory in his ‘‘practical criticism,’’ Coleridge gives detailed
analyses of many opening scenes, which he regards as the ‘‘germ’’ out of which the
unity of the whole can be developed. He also points out individual words in order to
prove that each part is essential to the whole: key words such as ‘‘again’’ in the first
scene of Hamlet, ‘‘honest’’ in Othello, ‘‘crying’’ in Prospero’s account of his flight from
Milan with the infant Miranda, encompass the meaning of the whole (Coleridge 1960,
1:18, 46-7, 2: 135. See also Bate 1986: 14). In his combination of practical criticism
with a belief in the ‘‘organic unity’’ of the work of art, as developed in chapter 15 of
the Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge became an early proponent of what would
later be called New Criticism. Coleridge, who coined the word ‘‘psychoanalytical,’’
also instigated and participated in the Hamlet fever that held many intellectuals in its
grip throughout the nineteenth century and relates character interpretation to idealistic philosophy: ‘‘Hamlet’s character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. . . . I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so’’
(Coleridge June 15, 1827, [1835] 1990, 2: 61).
According to Coleridge, Shakespeare’s supreme artistry is due to his ‘‘Protean’’
nature, the ability to transcend slavish copy by creative imitation, to sympathize with
his characters while still remaining detached:
While the former [Shakespeare] darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of
human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts
all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL. All things and modes
of action shape themselves anew in the being of MILTON; while SHAKSPEARE
becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. (Coleridge 1907: 27-8)
The essentials of Coleridge’s aesthetics are represented by an impersonal author who is
yet sympathetic, organic unity of the work of art, and a close relationship between
poetry and philosophy. The image of Shakespeare as Proteus was one of the most
fruitful concepts among the Romantic Shakespearean critics (Bate 1986: 15ff.).
Hazlitt based his criticism on the principle of sympathy (in opposition to the
criticism of A. W. Schlegel, whom he admired but found overtheoretical) and claims
accordingly that Shakespeare had ‘‘a perfect sympathy with all things,’’ yet was ‘‘alike
indifferent to all,’’ that he was characterized by ‘‘the faculty of transforming himself at
will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from
the exact point of view in which others would see it. He was the Proteus of the human
intellect’’ (Hazlitt 1930-4, 8: 42). These remarks are the forerunners of Keats’s belief
that men of genius ‘‘have not any individuality, any determined Character,’’ but are
like chameleons (Keats 1965, 1: 184).
Despite the success of great actors and actresses such as Sarah Siddons, John
Kemble, and Edmund Kean, antitheatrical prejudice was rampant and the fitness of
34
Heike Grundmann
Shakespeare’s plays for the stage was a contested issue. Charles Lamb attempts to
reduce Shakespeare to an ideal substratum and argues that the embodiment of his
characters on stage amounts to a debasement: ‘‘instead of realising an idea, we have
only brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood’’;8 the reader’s
imagination on the contrary purifies the drama from human and moral implications.
On the stage, characters such as Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago are criminals, but in
the reading process their spiritual qualities – ambition, the poetic language, and the
sublimity of their vision – are revealed. Hazlitt, on the contrary, realized that
appreciation of Shakespeare on the stage depended simply on the quality of the actors
and their representation of the text.9
Whereas Romantic criticism attains an integral understanding of Shakespeare,
creative imitation of his work is concentrated on single visions, images, and stylistic
specialties – the very greatness of Shakespeare seems to have exerted an inhibiting
influence on British dramatic productivity in the nineteenth century. Attempts to
create a neo-Elizabethan drama end up in closet dramas such as Robert Southey’s Wat
Tyler, Coleridge’s Remorse and Zapolya, Wordsworth’s Borderers, Shelley’s Charles I and
Keats’s Otho the Great. Only Shelley’s play The Cenci (1819) transcends mere imitation
and fulfills the demand expressed in the preface to bind the imagery to the passion.
Shelley also rewrites Shakespeare’s Richard II into Charles I by putting Gaunt’s
patriotic death speech into the mouth of the freedom fighter John Hampden, thereby
turning it from a defense of national freedom into a defense of individual freedom.
Lord Byron (1788-1824) changes Macbeth in his drama Manfred (1817) into the hero
of an autonomous imagination, Ann Radcliffe widens Macbeth’s visions into passages
of gothic terror in The Italian (1797), Keats (1795-1821) deploys Shakespearean
imagery in his poems ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes’’ (1819) or ‘‘On Sitting Down to Read
King Lear Once Again,’’ and William Blake (1757-1827) chooses single images as
topics for his illustrations. Most Romantic poets take lines, imagery, and stylistic
features of Shakespeare, making their own work into a web of references in admiration
of the bard, but also to cope with their own feeling of inferiority and belatedness.10
German ‘‘Shakespearomanie’’
The feeling of belatedness and lack of a great national literature of their own induced
in German writers an enthusiastic Shakespeare cult, which exceeded the bardolatry of
the other countries on the continent and from the start combined admiration with
identification and appropriation (Aneignung). In contrast to the British reception of
their national poet in the nineteenth century, the Germans regarded Shakespeare as
exemplary of the democratic and progressive liberal cultural life of England and tried
to incorporate him as a third ‘‘German classic’’ into their own culture.
This wholehearted embrace of Shakespeare was inhibited at first by French rationalist criticism (Voltaire, Boileau), which gave Germany a Classicist image of Shakespeare. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66), approaching Shakespeare from a
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
35
didactic point of view, criticized him for his irregularity, mixture of kings and
beggars, violation of the unities, and lack of clarity. Tragedy was meant for moral
improvement of the audience and therefore should not depict free-reigning passions
but stoic endurance (Pascal 1937: 3ff.). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729-81) 17th
Litteraturbrief of 1759 reverses these dramatic values. Whereas Gottsched set out from
moral intention, Lessing made the first principle of tragedy the excitement of passion
(‘‘Erregung der Leidenschaft’’) and sympathetic identification of the spectator with the
hero (‘‘Mitleiden’’). As tragedy must have in his view a subjective, emotive value, he
condemns the Procrustean influence of the French classical drama (Corneille) and
holds Shakespeare up as a model.11 J. J. Eschenburg’s translations were replaced by
Christoph Martin Wieland’s (1733-1813) translation of 22 plays which appeared
between 1762 and 1766, and from this time Shakespeare became the common
property of all educated Germans.
A new generation, later designated as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress),12
comprising Gerstenberg, Klinger, Lenz, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, worshiped
Shakespeare for his evocative power to involve the audience in the action. In their
rebellion against the bureaucracy and despotism of German provincialism and political quietism Shakespeare meant for them an intellectual revolution, a liberation of
senses, feeling, and imagination. With Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744-1803) essay
on Shakespeare of 1773, historical criticism was inaugurated: Greek drama is the
product of the climatic and geographical position of Greece and its national culture
and tradition, while Shakespeare is the product of the north and of entirely different
cultural conditions: ‘‘Thus Sophocles’s drama and Shakespeare’s drama are two things
which in a certain respect have scarcely the name in common.’’13 This was not only a
new view of the querelle des anciens et des modernes, liberating modern authors from the
oppressive comparison with the Greeks, but also an attempt at description and
interpretation instead of accusation or defense of Shakespeare; Herder ‘‘would rather
explain him, feel him as he is, use him, and – if possible – make him alive for us in
Germany’’ (Bate 1992: 39).
The admiration of the Sturm und Drang authors did not remain merely theoretical,
in that Shakespeare’s language of passion, daring imagery, and twisted syntax had a
deep impact upon their own dramatic practice. These angry young men adopted less
Shakespeare’s plots than his characters, especially those of his great villains (Richard
III, Iago, Macbeth), and used scenes and motifs (the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet,
the graveyard scene from Hamlet, the madness of Ophelia) in their own work for their
pictorial as well as their dramatic effect. A prominent example, the speech of the
disadvantaged evil brother Franz Moor in Friedrich Schiller’s (1759-1805) first play
The Robbers (1781), merges the nihilism of the bastard Edmund with the diabolical
hypocrisy of Richard III’s rebellion against his natural destiny of ugliness:
I have no small cause for being angry with Nature, and, by my honour! I will have
amends. – Why did I not crawl first from my mother’s womb? why not the only one?
why has she heaped on me this burden of deformity? on me especially? just as if she had
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Heike Grundmann
spawned me from her refuse. Why to me in particular this snub of the Laplander? these
negro lips? these Hottentot eyes? [ . . . ] No! no! I do her injustice – she bestowed
inventive faculty, and sets us naked and helpless on the shore of this great ocean, the
world – let those swim who can – the heavy may sink. To me she gave naught else, and
how to make the best use of my endowment is my present business. Men’s natural rights
are equal; claim is met by claim effort by effort, and force by force – right is with the
strongest – the limits of our power constitute our laws. (Schiller 1953: 18ff., my
translation)
Promethean rage against the injustice of nature and against patriarchal authority,
expressed in a staccato of questions and exclamations, makes the ancestry of Schiller’s
language evident. Shelley will learn this play by heart, Wordsworth and Coleridge use it
as a dramatic springboard, and Verdi in 1846 uses it as a source for his opera I Masnadieri –
in homage to Schiller as well as to Shakespeare. Schiller’s work abounds with characters
similar to Shakespearean characters: obvious parallels are the elder Moor and Gloucester/
Lear; Don Carlos and Hamlet; Fiesko and elements of Caesar and Coriolanus; in the
Wallenstein trilogy Gräfin Terzky and Lady Macbeth, Illo at the Banquet and Lepidus (in
Anthony and Cleopatra); MacDonald and Deverous and the murderers in Richard III.14
Sturm und Drang drama is the drama of idealistic young heroes (such as Karl Moor,
Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, Schiller’s Ferdinand von Walter, Klinger’s Simsone
Grisaldo and Guelfo) thwarted by a society dominated by corruption and evil. Usually
their fight for freedom and love is frustrated, and a yearning for withdrawal into the
idyllic can be discerned in many of the plays. The restrictive conditions of the political
situation in Germany forced these authors to create men whose desire to act is frustrated,
idealists and sentimentalists who remain ineffectual in their endeavors. This attitude
also had its effect on the staging of Shakespeare in Germany: he was produced in prose
translations, in which coarse characters and bawdy puns were excised, often by using
Garrick’s versions with imposed happy endings.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) had begun his career as a Sturm und
Drang author, hailing Shakespeare enthusiastically in his early speech ‘‘Zum Schäkespears Tag’’ (‘‘On Shakespeare’s Birthday,’’ 1771), in which he claims that the new
subjectivity, unencumbered by rules, can create characters that pulsate with the life of
Nature: ‘‘Nature, Nature! nothing is so much Nature as Shakespeare’s characters!’’
(Goethe 1986-, 1.2: 413, my translation). He disdains the unity of place as ‘‘incarcerating’’ (‘‘kerkermäßig ängstlich’’), the unities of action and time as ‘‘cumbersome
shackles of our imagination’’ (‘‘lästige Fesseln unsrer Einbildungskraft’’) (ibid., p. 412).
But when he goes to Weimar in 1775 to serve at the court of Herzog Karl August, a
shift in his attitude to society and social conventions gradually turns him into a
‘‘Classicist’’ (Klassiker) who develops a new regard for order (albeit the order of nature).
And yet the famous analysis of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) has
always been regarded as the starting point for the Romantic reception of Shakespeare,
which grew out of the famous characterization of Hamlet as being in his sensitivity
and introspectiveness too weak to carry out the demand for action that is imposed on
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
37
him: ‘‘Shakespeare tried to describe a great deed laid on a soul not adequate to the
task.’’15 The Hamlet passages are groundbreaking as the first example of the so-called
‘‘character criticism’’ that will dominate the Romantic approach to Shakespeare. In his
position as director of the reorganized Weimar theater, however, Goethe retreated
more and more from psychological realism, propagating a stylized formal acting mode
defined in his ‘‘Rules for Actors’’ (1803) and an unrealistic style of declamation
without much movement. Admittedly, in a 1795 production he allowed Hamlet to
die and restored the gravedigger scene (both of which elements had been traditionally
omitted), but the dominant ‘‘classical’’ tendency of the Weimar theater shows itself in
the production of Schiller’s free translation of Macbeth in 1800, when the incantations
of the witches are linked with the chorus of antique tragedy and Goethe had the
witches played by beautiful young maidens.16 Goethe’s own translation, or rather
trimming, of Romeo and Juliet of 1811 was a mutilation of the original. In his essay
‘‘Shakespeare and no End!’’ (1813-16) Goethe defends his way of producing Shakespeare on the Weimar stage. In strong opposition now to the views put forward by
A.W. Schlegel, Goethe maintains that Shakespeare is above all a poet to be read and
no poet of the theater, because only ‘‘what is immediately symbolical to the eye’’ is
theatrical and these moments of union are rare in his work: ‘‘Shakespeare’s whole
method finds in the stage itself something unwieldy and hostile’’ (Bate 1992: 7). For
the reader, the frequent changes of scene are no drawback, but for the spectator they
are confusing. Shakespeare is lacking in ‘‘action evident to the senses’’ (‘‘sinnliche Tat’’),
the events and scenes of the plays are ‘‘better imagined than seen’’ (Bate 1992: 6). Yet
this criticism is tempered by extravagant praise, as this essay also contains what is in
effect the ‘‘classical’’ restatement of the earlier Sturm und Drang encomium in its
affirmation of Shakespeare’s universal significance – he is unique in that he combines
the despotic idea of fate and necessity that dominates the drama of antiquity with the
modern concept of individual volition, thereby reconciling liberty with necessity
(‘‘Wollen’’ and ‘‘Sollen’’).
The next generation, called in Germany the ‘‘Early Romantics’’ (Frühromantiker), no
longer attempted to ‘‘better’’ the poet, but rather to understand him, to emphasize the
theatrical abilities of Shakespeare. These writers constituted a close-knit coterie of
poets and critics, writing half-esoterically only for a very small public so that their
periodical Athenäum tended to be aphoristic and obscure. A. W. Schlegel fought for
productions of Shakespeare in their original form despite misgivings about their
public reception. Their greatest achievement, however, was the still unsurpassed
Schlegel–Tieck translation of Shakespeare’s plays. Schlegel’s translations of 17 of the
plays between 1797 and 1810 broke new ground in attempting to reproduce Shakespeare’s blank verse and idiom in a German as close to the English original as possible,
and although they met with some opposition at the time, they have attained canonical
status and given Germany the Shakespeare most people still read, know, and perform
today.17 Their popularity has been to a large extent responsible for Shakespeare’s
having been claimed by Germans as ‘‘their’’ leading dramatist, and his plays are
performed on the German stage more than those of any other writer.
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Heike Grundmann
The ‘‘Early Romantic’’ criticism of Shakespeare follows similar lines. Ludwig
Tieck’s (1773-1853) famous introduction to his translation of The Tempest, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Treatment of the Marvellous’’ (1793), praises Shakespeare’s comedies for their
complete and consistent unreality, their dreamlike quality which until then had been
subjected to severe condemnation. The rehabilitation of the fantastic not only saved
plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest from the accusation of
lacking probability and realism, but influenced the German Romantic comedy, which
deploys fantastic characters and events in abundance. Tieck’s own works, such as Puss
in Boots (1797), Prince Zerbino (1798), and The World Upside Down (1799), are set in a
fairy-tale world; Clemens Brentano’s (1778-1842) Ponce de Leon (1804) is an imitation
of As You Like It; and Joseph von Eichendorff’s The Wooers (1833) imitates Twelfth
Night.18 Tieck, who had visited England in 1817 and subsequently became a theater
critic in Dresden, also wrote a defense of Shakespeare as a poet of the theater,
‘‘Remarks on some Characters in Hamlet and about the Way they can be Presented
on the Stage’’ (1823), disputing the persistent notion that Shakespeare had not been a
dramatic poet.19
In 1796, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) began his series of essays on
Shakespeare with the object of proving the formal consistency of his work, the
unity of every detail with the whole, and also (for the first time) exploring Shakespeare’s sources. In his famous essay ‘‘On Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,’’ published
in Schiller’s journal Die Horen (1797), Schlegel shows the artistry of the composition
of this play, which is based on binary oppositions: the enmity of the Capulets and
Montagues is mirrored in the antagonism of servants and minor characters and in the
relationship of Romeo and Juliet. Comic characters, such as Mercutio and the Nurse,
whose parts had been excised and mutilated for ages, are now elevated from the status
of superfluous comic elements and ‘‘possenhafte Intermezzisten’’ (farcical intermezzists; Goethe 1986-, 11: 184) to that of structurally necessary devices, namely as
contrastive foils.
Both August Wilhelm and his brother Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) regarded
Shakespeare as an example of technical excellence instead of mere natural genius, as
the Sturm und Drang authors had claimed. In an aphorism in the Athenäum of 1798,
Friedrich Schlegel characterizes Shakespeare as the most ‘‘systematic’’ and ‘‘correct’’
author, correctness meaning here the conscious construction of all parts in the spirit of
the whole, and claims that the deliberateness of construction (Absichtlichkeit) makes
him a supremely conscious artist (quoted in Pascal 1937: 141). A. W. Schlegel’s
famous and highly influential Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808-11), held
in Vienna when the city was under Napoleonic siege, give an outline of the society
and culture of Shakespeare’s period and derive the nature of his drama from the
political climate of the Elizabethan period – the age of exploration and heroism,
which was far superior to his listeners’ own time. This brilliant example of historicostructural criticism was further developed in the series of lectures on Shakespeare
held in 1806 in Dresden by the economist and literary historian Adam Müller (17701829). In his theory Müller (writing almost like a precursor of Mikhail Bakhtin)
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
39
differentiates ‘‘monological’’ from ‘‘dialogical’’ drama. Sentimental dramas, based on
audience identification and a simple scheme of reward and punishment, are distinguished from Shakespeare’s infinitely more complex histories, which he calls ‘‘dialogical,’’ because they prevent simple identification and confront the audience with an
abundance of possible meanings and positions.20
Strangely enough, while Shakespeare became more and more ingrained into Germany’s national culture and performances that were true to the original were more
frequent in Germany than in England, Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel and the
idealist philosopher F. W. J. von Schelling (1775-1854) began to criticize Shakespeare’s pessimism and lack of metaphysical consolation, preferring the Spanish poet
of the siglo d’oro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81). This paradigmatic change was due to
a yearning for ultimate meaning and harmony that could not be satisfied by Shakespeare’s openness and multivocality and that had indeed induced many Romantics to
convert to Catholicism. From about 1815 onwards Shakespeare ceases to be the slogan
of an aesthetic that is regarded as progressive and becomes more and more the subject
of literary scholarship without a close connection to contemporary developments in
literature.21
French École Romantique – Shakespeare c’est le drame!
To a greater degree than Johnson in England and Gottsched in Germany, Voltaire
(François Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) was the enemy in opposition to whom the
French Romantics had to define themselves. Ambivalent utterances by the early
Voltaire, who appreciated Shakespeare’s greatness despite his barbarism and breaking
of the rules, had given way to an increasing inclination to disparage Shakespeare in
order to assert the supremacy of Corneille and Racine. While still calling Shakespeare
a genius, he is unequivocal about his faults in the 18th of his Lettres philosophiques
(1734): ‘‘He had a genius full of force and fecundity, of the natural and the sublime,
without the least glimmer of good taste and without the least knowledge of the
rules.’’22 Just as Voltaire’s knowledge of Shakespeare evidently comprised only a small
canon (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Othello), Shakespeare seems to have been virtually
unknown to his contemporaries. Voltaire even opposed La Place’s translation of
Shakespeare into French out of fear that widespread accessibility of the English
‘‘Gille de la foire’’ (crier in the marketplace) would undermine good taste. In contrast
to the effect J. J. Eschenburg’s translations (1775-82) had in Germany, not even Pierre
Félicien Le Tourneur’s pioneering Shakespeare translations (1776-82) succeeded in
enlarging the canon; for more than 50 years Shakespeare remained a sleeping beauty
in a country paralyzed by neo-Classicism. An exception to the mood of his time, Le
Tourneur appreciates in the Preface to his translation (like the Sturm und Drang
authors) the historical embeddedness of a work of art, and thereby paves the way
for a later Romantic re-evaluation of Shakespeare: ‘‘Pour mieux apprécier les travaux de
tout Artiste, il faut les reporter au siècle où il a vécu, et comparer ses succès avec ses moyens’’
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Heike Grundmann
(In order to best appreciate a writer’s work one must go back to the period in which he
lived and compare his success with his means), he writes, and states with regret
‘‘Shakespeare est vraiment inconnu en France’’ (Shakespeare is really unknown in France; Le
Tourneur 1990: 55).
Early proponents of the French ‘‘school’’ of Romanticism, such as François René de
Chateaubriand (1768-1848), could not shake free from the manacles of Voltaire’s
criticism, but in his Mélanges littéraires (1801), despite criticism of Shakespeare’s
faults, he betrays his enthusiasm when he describes the ‘‘Striking Beauties of Shakespeare’’ and expresses his doubts of the value of neo-Classic rule (Chateaubriand 1837:
267-78; see also excerpts in LeWinter 1963: 73-81). A turn of the tide sets in with
Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814), whose treatise ‘‘Du Théâtre, ou Nouvel Essai sur
l’art dramatique’’ (1773) attacks Voltaire and stresses the superiority of natural genius
over artificial rules (unity of interest), and with Mme de Staël’s (1766-1817) classic
work De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Mme
de Staël rehabilitates Shakespeare by reaccentuating the relation between art and
nature, as well as by defining literature as dependent on national, historical, and
geographical parameters: ‘‘Shakespeare opened a new literature; it was borrowed,
without doubt, from the general spirit and colour of the north: but it was he who
gave to the English literature its impulsation, and to their dramatic art its character’’
(in Bate 1992: 73).
Art no longer is supposed to impose an atemporal ideal order on the chaos of
reality, but to give an ‘‘authentic’’ representation; Classicist bienséance is replaced by
naturalness, one-dimensional heroes by complex characters. These paradigmatic shifts
appear familiar to readers of German criticism, and indeed Mme de Staël became one
of the most influential promoters of the lectures A. W. Schlegel had held at Vienna.
These lectures may have appealed to her because of their anti-Napoleonic thrust, as
she herself had been exiled by Napoleon in 1803 and again in 1806. Her final
banishment from France was the result of her seminal work De l’Allemagne (1810),
in which she openly espoused German culture and gave a survey of German Romanticism.23 She follows Goethe in claiming that Shakespeare’s ‘‘pieces deserve more to be
read than to be seen’’ in order to appreciate their underlying ideas, and points out
Shakespeare’s popular, ‘‘democratic’’ appeal: ‘‘In England, all classes are equally
attracted by the pieces of Shakspeare. Our finest tragedies, in France, do not interest
the people’’ (Mme de Staël, On Germany, in Bate 1992: 82).
The difficulty of making Shakespeare palatable to the taste of an audience attuned
to Classicism became vividly clear in July 1822 when a performance of Othello by
English actors in Paris was drowned out by the cries of an enraged audience: ‘‘Down
with Shakespeare! A lieutenant of Wellington!’’ The angry crowds had to be dispersed
by the cavalry, yet this memorable event induced Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle, 17831842) to publish an article in the Paris Monthly Review in October of the same year
that later became the first chapter of his notorious pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare
(1823).24 Stendhal presents a witty dispute between ‘‘The Academician’’ and ‘‘The
Romantic’’ on the question whether Shakespeare rather than Racine should become
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
41
the model for drama. ‘‘The Romantic’’ clearly states that the observation of the unities
of place and time ‘‘ . . . is a French habit, a deeply rooted habit, a habit of which we can
rid ourselves with difficulty, because Paris is the salon of Europe and gives it its tone;
but I say that these unities are in no way necessary to produce a profound emotion and
true dramatic effect’’ (Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, in Bate 1992: 218). The unities
are superfluous in a drama that achieves ‘‘moments of perfect illusion,’’ as the
spectator’s imagination is ‘‘concerned solely with the events and the development of
passions that are put before his eyes,’’ without thinking about the probability of an
action that encompasses months of real time in a two-hour performance; in this
respect Shakespeare is superior (ibid., pp. 221-3). Modern drama must liberate itself
from the Procrustean bed of neo-Classicism and follow the model of Shakespeare in
his disregard for the unities, his combination of verse and prose, the heroic and the
quotidian.
Stendhal prepared the way for the great, albeit brief, influence of Shakespeare on
French literature that set in with Victor Hugo’s (1802-85) preface to his drama
Cromwell (1827). This famous attack on Classicism places Shakespeare in a line of
succession with Homer and the Bible; whereas Homer lived in the age of epic and the
Bible was written in the age of the lyric, we are now living in the age of the drama –
and ‘‘Shakespeare, c’est le drame’’: ‘‘We have now attained the culminating point of
modern poetry. Shakespeare is the Drama; and the drama, which combines in one
breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the absurd, tragedy and
comedy, is the salient characteristic of the third epoch of poetry, of the literature of
to-day’’ (Hugo 1896, in Bate 1992: 225).
Hugo proclaims the liberty of art as opposed to the despotism of systems, laws, and
rules, and even slaps Voltaire in the face by praising the mixture of the sublime and
the grotesque in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, a scene that the great arbiter of taste
had condemned most ferociously. Hugo’s conviction that ‘‘the grotesque is one of the
supreme beauties of the drama’’ is put into practice in his panoramic historical novel
Les Misérables (1845-62) and his gothic masterpiece Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), which
is still unsurpassed in its depiction of carnivalesque medievalism and as a psychological study of religious and sexual obsession. These narrative works brought him the
title of the ‘‘Shakespeare of the novel’’ (Lamartine). His first attempt to put his
insights into dramatic practice in his verse play Cromwell (published 1827, but first
performance not until1956) failed because of the play’s ‘‘epic’’ proportions: the sheer
number of characters (the Protector Cromwell alone is provided with four fools!), the
many comic and grotesque scenes that were intended to give a first-hand feeling of life
at the time of the English Civil War, and the use of the alexandrine verse made the
play unsuited for stage performance.
Although Cromwell remained a closet drama, contemporary French audiences
gained increasing access to performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Charles Kemble and
Harriet Smithson, acting in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Odéon in Paris, were
not only celebrated by intellectuals such as Eugène Delacroix (who was to paint scenes
from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello), Alexandre Dumas (who would later adapt Hamlet),
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Heike Grundmann
Théophile Gautier, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Vigny, and Hugo
himself, but they were ‘‘the trigger for the explosion of French Romanticism’’ (Bate
1992: 27). Hector Berlioz, whose work (most notably his Roméo et Juliette symphony)
gives testimony to Shakespeare’s influence, vividly captured the impact of this
performance of Hamlet (where he watched his future wife in the role of Ophelia) in
his Mémoires:
Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt. The lightning
flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it
to its remotest corner. I recognized the meaning of grandeur, beauty, dramatic truth,
and I could measure the utter absurdity of the French view of Shakespeare which derives
from Voltaire [ . . . ] I saw, I understood, I felt . . . that I was alive and that I must arise
and walk. (Berlioz 1969: 95)
The aesthetic battle was just about to start, and the first performance of Hugo’s
perhaps most influential verse drama Hernani ou L’Honneur castillan (1830), written
not in alexandrines but in the irregular vers coupé, was marked by a violent clash
between Classicists and Romantics in the audience, which would enter theater history
as the Bataille d’Hernani.25 Under the leadership of Théophile Gautier the Romantics
decided this battle in their favor, and the aesthetic revolution instigated by the success
of Hernani became an important precedent for the political revolution later in 1830,
when riots in a theater spread to the streets and after three days of violence Charles X
abdicated and fled the country. Aesthetics merged with politics, and yet the hailing of
a revolutionary taste in art did not necessarily tie in with a progressive political
attitude. As early as in 1821, François Guizot (1787-1874) can argue from an almost
conservative position in his introduction to a newly revised edition of Shakespeare
translations: ‘‘At the present day, all controversy regarding Shakspeare’s genius and
glory has come to an end. No one ventures any longer to dispute them; but a greater
question has arisen, namely whether Shakspeare’s dramatic system is not far superior
to that of Voltaire.’’ 26
Guizot gives a detailed sociohistorical analysis of the emergence of Shakespeare’s
drama out of traditional English forms of popular culture and holidays. He claims
that ‘‘a theatrical performance is a popular festival’’ and explains the origin of drama
by recourse to the games, May festivals, banquets, Morris dances, and Robin Hood
performances of medieval and early modern British country life. Theater is ‘‘among
the people and for the people’’ and once it loses its connection to its roots – when it is
appropriated by the ‘‘superior classes’’ – it will decline. As in Hugo, this argument is
deployed to explain the juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic in Shakespeare: ‘‘The
comic portion of human realities had a right to take its place wherever its presence
was demanded or permitted by truth; and such was the character of civilisation, that
tragedy, by admitting the comic element, did not derogate from truth in the slightest
degree’’ (Guizot in Bate 1992: 210). Hamlet and the gravediggers, Falstaff and Henry
V, Macbeth and the porter, high and low belong together, and ‘‘without this inter-
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
43
vention of the inferior classes, how many dramatic effects, which contribute powerfully to the general effect, would become impossible!’’ (ibid., p. 215). Guizot traces
the heterogeneity of Shakespeare’s characters back to the ‘‘democratic’’ liberal spirit of
English society under Elizabeth I, which he claimed should become the model for a
French national egalitarian theater, yet this promotion of the people in drama did not
lead the same author to support the people in political matters. Although after 1830
he became Minister for Education, then Foreign Minister, and eventually Prime
Minister, he resisted extensions of the franchise and in February 1848 he fell from
power and became the victim of another revolution.27 Although the French Romantic
movement included some of the greatest intellectuals of the period, it remained
largely a shift of aesthetic paradigm, which established Shakespeare securely as
supreme dramatist, but was ineffectual in the long run. Critics such as Guizot and
Mézières could remain conservatives while still admiring Shakespeare, as he had
ceased to be the center of controversy. When in 1864 Victor Hugo expressed his
Romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare in his introduction to translations of Shakespeare by his son, the countermovement against Romanticism had already set in with
Hippolyte Taine’s rational and scientific approach to literature and history.
Further Developments
The French Classicist influence determined both dramatic practice and Shakespeare’s
reception in Italy, Russia, Eastern Europe, and to a certain degree Spain as well. Not
until Ugo Foscolo’s (1778-1827) ranking of Shakespeare with Alfieri, Sophocles, and
Voltaire as a great tragedian was he regarded as worthy of study in Italy. In his
epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802), the suicidal hero, who suffers from
the torn condition of the state of Italy, asserts that Shakespeare ‘‘possessed’’ his
imagination and ‘‘fired’’ his heart. But his voice alone was not strong enough to
supersede the ambivalent Voltairean attitude toward Shakespeare. In 1814, Madame
de Staël’s De l’Allemagne was published in translation and made disciples of younger
writers such as Michele Leoni and Giacomo Leopardi. Translations and critical
prefaces followed in abundance, and Shakespeare was again used to overthrow the
classical critical doctrine, particularly the three unities.28 Alessandro Manzoni (17851873), who ranked Shakespeare with Virgil, became the major Shakespeare critic in
Italy as well as one of his advocates in his own works. I Promessi sposi (1827), one of the
most important novels of Romantic literature, shows this influence clearly. In his
‘‘Letter to M. Chauvet on the Unity of Time and Place in Tragedy’’ Manzoni contrasts
Othello with Voltaire’s Zaı̈re, claiming that Shakespeare’s breach of the unity of time
makes his play much more convincing, because it allows Othello’s jealousy to develop,
while Voltaire, operating within the narrow confines of his 24 hours, must depend on
chance. He dispenses with the unity of place as well by claiming that the imagination
will help the audience to follow the fictional characters on the stage from one place to
another: ‘‘it is the mind of the spectator which follows them – he has no travelling to
44
Heike Grundmann
do except to imagine to himself that he is traveling [sic]. Do you think that he has
come to the theatre to see real events?’’(Lettere, Manzoni 1843: 257-60, in LeWinter
1963: 133). Creative imitation can be seen at work in the libretti of the time, which
took Shakespeare’s subjects and abbreviated and simplified them in order to further
the democratic art of the Risorgimento, which would become fully realized in
Giuseppe Verdi’s operas (Macbetto, 1847, Otello 1887, Falstaff 1893).
Russia, which imitated French cultural centralism, painting, architecture, and
lifestyle, followed the Classicist French example in literature as well, and most
translations of Shakespeare were based on French or German precursors (La Place,
Ducis, Eschenburg) (see Levin 1993, Strı́brný 2000). A Russian nationalist and
‘‘Romantic’’ consciousness arose in 1812 in the war against Napoleon, which created
a hitherto unknown solidarity between the leaders and the governed and developed
into a veritable Russian Hamletism after the crushing of the Decembrist revolt in
1825. The failed revolutionary hopes clearly had an impact on Mikhail Lermontov
(1814-41), the greatest Russian Romantic poet, who imitates Hamlet’s poetic language of weakness, indecisiveness, and irresoluteness, for instance in his poem
‘‘Duma’’ (‘‘Meditation’’).
For Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) it was not the revolutionary author
of Macbeth and Julius Caesar, nor of Hamlet, but Shakespeare as the poet of the people –
the creator of Falstaff – that attracted him. Reading Shakespeare in Le Tourneur’s
translation (he knew English only from 1828 onwards, after four months of studying
it), he used his knowledge of Shakespeare to help him put the catastrophe of
December 14, 1825 in perspective: the role of chance in the course of world history,
the illegitimacy of power, and the right of the people to revolt were the pre-eminent
elements of his reception of Shakespeare. After having read ‘‘The Rape of Lucrece’’ he
parodies it in his own poem ‘‘Count Nulin.’’ Because mere chance governs history, the
rape of Lucrece could have been avoided if she had just given Tarquinius a box on
the ears. Then the kings would not have been expelled by Brutus and world history
would have taken another direction. Boris Godunov (1825) is intended as a drama of
the people and employs single lines taken from Shakespeare’s plays as well as clearly
Shakespearean scenes depicting the masses of the people on stage. Boris Godunov
himself is a highly mixed character, combining elements of a tragic loving father, an
evil murderer, a hypocrite and a Christ figure, a cowardly usurper and a legitimate
monarch all in one: ‘‘Shakespeare’s characters, unlike Molière’s types, are not governed
by one single passion, one single vice, but are living beings, governed by many
passions and many vices; the varying and manifold characters are developed in front of
the spectators according to circumstances’’ (Pushkin, quoted by Etkind 1988: 253,
my translation).
In his essay La Vie de Shakespeare (1821) Pushkin summarized his ideas on Shakespeare (which are based on the work of François Guizot), holding Shakespeare to be
the absolute opposite of Classicist and aristocratic systems: he is the representative of
democracy; the restoration in France after 1815 is comparable to the Elizabethan age;
history is not the biography of kings, but the creation of the people; history has a
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
45
moral, and Shakespeare represents artistic, political, and moral freedom (Etkind 1988,
Parfenov and Price 1988). This antifeudal, subversive Falstaffian Shakespeare found
his way into the new genre that asserted its supremacy by the middle of the century,
the novel, and especially in the work of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Notes
1 Jonathan Bate (1986: 6) states: ‘‘The rise of
Romanticism and the growth of Shakespeare
idolatry are parallel phenomena.’’ He also
quotes Friedrich Schlegel: ‘‘Shakespeares
Universalität ist wie der Mittelpunkt der
romantischen Kunst’’ (Schlegel 1967: aphorism 247).
2 Works such as Edward Young’s Conjectures on
Original Composition and Alexander Gerard’s
Essay on Genius especially influenced the German discussion on imagination and genius,
beginning with the Sturm und Drang movement.
3 Jonathan Bate stresses this close connection
in his introduction both to Shakespeare and the
English Romantic Imagination (1986) and to
his anthology The Romantics on Shakespeare
(1992).
4 On the history of the Shakespeare cult see
Dávidházi (1998) and Felperin (1991).
5 de Grazia (1991) shows how Edmond Malone
played down the image of Shakespeare as
poet from the people.
6 Hazlitt, ‘‘A Letter to William Gifford, Esq.’’
(Hazlitt 1930-4, vol. 9: 13). Hazlitt’s subversive reading of Measure for Measure as a
criticism not of sexual lust, but instead of
‘‘want of passion’’ aroused the wrath of the
critical establishment. See Bate (1992: 24).
7 On the issue of influence or plagiarism see
McFarland (1969).
8 Lamb, ‘‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for
stage representation’’ (essay in the Reflector,
1811). See the extract in Bate (1992: 11127).
9 On Hazlitt’s ambivalent attitude see Bate
(1992: 32).
10 For a comprehensive account of Shakespeare’s
influence on the language and imagery of the
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
British Romantics in their poetic practice,
see Bate (1986).
See Number 17 of his Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend (February 16, 1759) and his
Hamburgische Dramaturgie, part 2, piece 63
(January 12, 1768). The relevant passages
can be found in Pascal (1937: 50-2).
This movement of the 1770s is different
from what is regarded as Romanticism in
Germany, yet the ‘‘Storm and Stress’’ movement has been related to early Romanticism
abroad and shows many similarities with it.
Schlegel contests this view when he differentiates between the unconscious naı̈veté of
these authors and the consciousness of the
real Romantics.
Herder, ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ first published in an
anonymous collection of five essays edited by
Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art). See Herder (1985).
Reprinted in Bate (1992: 39-48, 40).
Coleridge, who translated The Piccolomini and
The Death of Wallenstein, regarded these plays
as the closest modern equivalents of Shakespeare.
This line runs in German: ‘‘eine große Tat auf
eine Seele gelegt, die der Tat nicht gewachsen
ist,’’ Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Ein Roman
(Goethe 1986-, 5.4: 245, my translation).
At a later period of German history, Georg
Herwegh will see in Hamlet’s inability to act
the epitome of the German ‘‘malaise’’ and
Ferdinand Freiligrath will claim ‘‘Deutschland ist Hamlet’’ (Germany is Hamlet).
See Williams (1990: 88-107). Macbeth was
produced with great success, and repeated
in 1804, 1806, 1808, and 1810.
For a concise summary of the debate and
Tieck’s role in it, see Habicht (1993) and
Zybura (1994).
46
Heike Grundmann
18 Heinrich von Kleist in his drama The Schroffenstein Family (Die Familie Schroffenstein) of
1803, combines Shakespeare with Rousseau
and gives a gothic rendering of the tragic tale
of Romeo and Juliet’s love and death.
19 Tieck also was the first in Germany to investigate the nature of the Shakespearean stage
and to study the playwrights contemporary
with Shakespeare in his Letters on Shakespeare
(Briefe über Shakspeare) in 1800. See Pascal
(1937: 29, 133).
20 See his ‘‘Fragmente über William Shakespeare’’
(‘‘Fragments concerning William Shakespeare’’) in his ‘‘Vorlesungen über die dramatische
Kunst’’ (‘‘Lectures on Dramatic Art’’). A translation from his Vermischte Schriften über Staat,
Philosophie und Kunst (Diverse Writings on Philosophy, Art and State) is available in Bate
(1992: 83-7).
21 A witty element within the burgeoning Shakespeare scholarship of the nineteenth century is to be found in Heinrich Heine’s
(1797-1856) prose piece ‘‘Shakespeare’s
Maidens and Women’’ (1839) which is
enlightening and full of the sharp irony of a
master satirist.
22 ‘‘Il avait un génie plein de force et de fécondité, de naturel et de sublime, sans la
moindre étincelle de bon goût et sans
la moindre connaissance des règles’’ (Voltaire
1964: 104).
23 Bate (1992: 10). On the historical and biographical circumstances of her writing see
Isbell (1994) and Posgate (1969).
24 See Bate (1992: 26). On the topic of Shakespeare on the French stage see Lambert
(1993).
25 The play shows the influence both of Corneille’s Cid and of Schiller’s Robbers and the
characters depicted are a mixture of heroism
and evil weaknesses. For a description of this
battle see Gautier ([1874] 2000).
26 From On the Life and Works of Shakspeare
(1821), repr. in Guizot (1852), in Bate
(1992: 203).
27 For an account of his conservative attitude see
Bate (1992: 30).
28 A good summary of Shakespeare’s reception
in Italy, France, Russia, Poland, Germany
and other countries as well as an excellent
bibliography can be found in Schabert (2000:
609-90).
References and Further Reading
Bate, Jonathan (1986). Shakespeare and the English
Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bate, Jonathan (1992). The Romantics on Shakespeare. London: Penguin.
Berlioz, Hector ([1870] 1969). The Memoirs of
Hector Berlioz, trans. David Cairns. New York:
Knopf.
Chateaubriand, François René de (1837). Sketches
of English Literature. London: Henry Colburn.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ([1835] 1990). Table
Talk Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge, ed.
Carl Woodring, 2 vols. London and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Princeton University
Press.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1907). Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1960). Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols., ed. Thomas M. Raysor. London: Constable.
Dávidházi, Péter (1998). The Romantic Cult of
Shakespeare. Literary Reception in Anthropological
Perspective. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.
de Grazia, Margreta (1991). Shakespeare Verbatim:
The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790
Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dryden, John ([1668] 1962). ‘‘Of Dramatic
Poesy.’’ In George Watson (ed.), Of Dramatic
Poesy and other Critical Essays, 2 vols. London:
Dent, pp. 70-130.
Etkind, Efim (1988). ‘‘Shakespeare in der russischen Dichtung des Goldnen Zeitalters.’’ In
Roger Bauer (ed.), Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik, Jahrbuch
für internationale Germanistik, vol. 22. Bern:
Peter Lang, pp. 241-61.
Felperin, Howard (1991). ‘‘Bardolatry Then
and Now.’’ In Jean I. Marsden (ed.), The Appropriation of Shakespeare. Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. Hemel
Shakespeare and European Romanticism
Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
pp. 129-44.
Gauthier, Théophile (2000). Histoire du romantisme.
In Victor Hugo par Théophile Gautier, choix de textes,
ed. Françoise Court-Pérez. Paris: H. Champion.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1986). Essays on
Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen
von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1986-). Sämtliche
Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, 21 vols.,
Münchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Richter et al.
München: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Guizot, François (1852). Shakspeare et son temps,
trans. as Shakspeare and his Times. London: R
Bentley.
Habicht, Werner (1993). ‘‘The Romanticism of
the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare and the History
of Nineteenth Century German Shakespeare
Translation.’’ In Dirk Delabastita and Lieven
D’Hulst (eds.), European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, pp. 45-54.
Hazlitt, William (1930-4). The Complete Works of
William Hazlitt, ed P. P. Howe, 21 vols. London: Dent.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1985). ‘‘On German
Character and Art.’’ In H. B. Nisbet (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and
Goethe, trans. Joyce P. Crick. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Hugo, Victor ([1827) 1896). Preface to ‘‘Oliver
Cromwell,’’ trans. I. G. Burnham. London.
Isbell, John C. (1994). The Birth of European Romanticism. Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘‘De
l’Allemagne’’ 1810-1813. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Samuel (1968). Johnson on Shakespeare, ed.
Arthur Sherbo, Yale edn. of the Works of Samuel
Johnson, vols. 7-8. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Keats, John (1965). The Letters of John Keats 18141821, 2 vols., ed. H. E. Rollins. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Lamb, Charles (1903-14). The Works, ed. Edward
V. Lucas, 11 vols. London: Methuen.
Lambert, José (1993).‘‘Shakespeare en France au
tournant du XVIII siècle. Un dossier européen.’’
In Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst (eds.),
47
European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in
the Romantic Age. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
pp. 25-44.
Levin, Yuri D. (1993). ‘‘Russian Shakespeare Translations in the Romantic Era.’’ In Dirk Delabastita
and Lieven D’Hulst (eds.), European Shakespeares.
Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp.75-90.
LeWinter, Oswald (ed.) (1963). Shakespeare in Europe. New York: World Publishing Co.
Le Tourneur, Pierre Félicien (1990). Préface du
Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois, ed. Jacques
Gury. Geneva: Droz.
Manzoni, Alessandro (1843). Opere complete, ed.
Niccolò Tommaséo Paris: Baudry.
McFarland, Thomas (1969). Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Müller, Adam (1817). Vermischte Schriften über
Staat, Philosophie und Kunst, 2nd edn. Vienna:
Heubner & Volke.
Parfenov, A. and Price, H. G. (eds.) (1988). Russian Essays on Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.
Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Pascal, Roy (1937). Shakespeare in Germany (17401815). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Posgate, Helen B. (1969). Madame de Staël. New
York: Twayne.
Schabert, Ina (ed.) (2000). Shakespeare Handbuch.
Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner.
Schiller, Friedrich (1953). Die Räuber. In Herbert
Stubenrauch (ed.), Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, vol. 3. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von ([1815] 1846).
A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature,
trans. John Black, revised A. J. W. Morrison.
London: G. Bohn.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1962-8). Kritische
Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner, 6 vols.
Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1967). Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801), ed. and introd. Hans Eichner. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed.
Ernst Behler et al., vol. 2. München: Paderborn.
Staël, Germaine de (1991). De la littérature, ed.
Gérard Gengembre. Paris: Flammarion.
Staël, Germaine de (1998-9). De l’Allemagne,
chron. and introd. Simone Balayé, 2 vols.
Paris: Flammarion.
48
Heike Grundmann
Stendhal ([1823] 1968). Racine et Shakespeare.
Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus.
Strı́brný, Zdenek (2000). Shakespeare and Eastern
Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Voltaire (1964). Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres
anglaises, ed. and introd. Raymond Naves.
Paris: Garnier Frères.
Williams, Simon (1990). Shakespeare on the German
Stage, vol. I: 1586-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Zybura, Marek (1994). Ludwig Tieck als Übersetzer
und Herausgeber. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
Winter.
3
Scottish Romanticism and
Scotland in Romanticism
Fiona Stafford
The imagination of Northern men soars beyond this earth, on which they live; it soars
through the clouds on the horizons that are like the mysterious gateway from life to
eternity. (Germaine de Staël 1820)
Scotland seems to have been hitherto the country of the Useful rather than the Fine
Arts. We are more prone to study realities than appearances . . . (William Hazlitt 1822)
Madame de Staël, surveying European literature at the turn of the nineteenth century,
saw a continent divided by geography, climate, and politics. In the warm South,
writers, basking in the lovely Mediterranean sunlight, had been filling their poems
with color and voluptuous imagery since the days of Homer. By contrast, the frozen
wastes of the North, fostering a fierce independence and seriousness, had given rise to
the most original and sublime poetry. Whatever the legacy of classical Greece or
Renaissance Italy, Northern Europe was the true homeland of the modern Romantic
imagination, its ultimate ancestor, the ancient Scottish bard, Ossian.
With such unreserved contemporary affirmation of Scotland’s importance to Romanticism, it is somewhat startling, then, to find William Hazlitt spitting with
indignation over the practical, utilitarian attitudes he perceived north of the Border.
‘‘Scotland,’’ he observed, ‘‘is of all other countries in the world perhaps the one in
which the question, ‘What is the use of that?’ is asked oftenest. But where this is the
case, the Fine Arts cannot flourish’’ (Hazlitt ([1822] 1930-4, 18: 168). While de Staël
celebrated the ‘‘Northern imagination that delights in the seashore, in the sound of
the wind, the wild heaths,’’ Hazlitt lamented ‘‘the cold, dry, barren soil,’’ where native
talent was ‘‘pinched and nipped into nothing’’ by public opinion and Kirk Assemblies.1 Far from being the natural cradle of the creative imagination, Scotland was, for
Hazlitt, its early grave.
Such polarized views demonstrate at once the complexity of Scotland’s relationship
to Romanticism. Seen by some as a symbol for free, imaginative expression, it struck
50
Fiona Stafford
others as narrowly provincial, intolerant, and altogether barren. Hazlitt’s view of the
arts being oppressed by Presbyterianism is similar to John Keats’s reaction: ‘‘These
Kirkmen have done Scotland harm – they have banished puns and laughing and
kissing.’’2 For Keats, part of Robert Burns’s tragedy was that ‘‘his disposition was
southern’’ and his naturally ‘‘luxurious imagination’’ was forced into self-defense
against inclement surroundings. Hazlitt’s chilly image of ‘‘cold, dry, barren soil’’ is
also reminiscent of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, where the hopes of
aspiring poets are ‘‘nipped in the bud by Caledonian gales.’’3 Scotland might be
widely regarded as the land of the sublime, but it was also seen as an inhospitable
environment where sensitive plants were likely to perish under the severe influences
of the Kirk and the critics. And yet Byron’s satire is itself complicated by his own
Scottish ancestry and by his frequent reference to poetry inspired by Scotland. As
Byron, heir to an English barony but born and educated in Scotland, was well
aware, there was no neat North/South, critical/creative divide: the relationship
between Scotland and imaginative writing was more complicated altogether. In
many instances, the assertion of creative freedom was a direct response to the
more utilitarian or condemnatory aspects of Scottish culture while, conversely,
Romantic admiration for Scotland might encompass a deep respect for plain speaking and solemnity.
Even those most exasperated by the narrowness they perceived in Scottish culture
were also aware of the irresistible magnetism of the North. Keats’s remarks on the
Kirkmen were made during his personal exploration of the country of Scott, Burns,
and Ossian. In Scotland he found beautiful heaths, magnificent glens, and above all,
mountains, which combined ‘‘to strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would
stopping at home among Books even though I should reach Homer’’ (letter to
Benjamin Bailey, July 22, 1818, in Keats 1958, I: 342). Like Keats and Byron,
William Wordsworth was also deeply wounded by reviews in the Edinburgh periodicals, but this did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for Scotland. Many of his
most beautiful lyrics, including ‘‘The Solitary Reaper,’’ ‘‘Yarrow Unvisited,’’ or
‘‘Stepping Westward,’’ were inspired by successive tours and a profound interest in
Scotland. Wordsworth celebrated the plain truths and deep wisdom of rural Scotland
in figures such as the Leech Gatherer and the Pedlar, while in the opening book of
The Prelude, he lingered on the idea of William Wallace as a subject for epic poetry.
Despite his deep attachment to England, Wordsworth eventually admitted that ‘‘I
have been indebted to the North for more than I shall ever be able to acknowledge’’
(letter to Allan Cunningham, November 23, 1825, in Selincourt 1978: 402). And
even Hazlitt, despite his outburst at the exhibition of Scottish art, was both an
eloquent champion of Burns and a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review.
Romantic Scotland might be a center of skeptical criticism, religious intolerance,
and utilitarian attitudes, but it was also a land of poetry, truth, and visionary
possibility.
Scottish Romanticism
51
Ossian, Enlightenment, and Romanticism
Although Madame de Staël’s image of Ossian as the spiritual ancestor of modern
poetry suggests a strain of Scottish Romanticism that is at odds with the skeptical,
down-to-earth attitudes prevailing in Edinburgh, James Macpherson’s ancient bard
derived as much from modern urban culture as from the Highlands. Throughout the
Romantic period, readers across Europe and America thrilled to the freedom of a lost
Celtic world but, as they did so, they were also enjoying a literary text whose form
and content was shaped by the politics and aesthetics of mid-eighteenth-century
Scotland. The apparently oppositional strains of imaginative release and practical
improvement were fused in Macpherson’s poetry to produce a powerful, and yet
elusive, image that contributed greatly to later Romantic perceptions of Scotland.
The Poems of Ossian are crucial to an understanding of Scotland and Romanticism not
merely because of their extraordinary influence on European writers, artists, and
musicians, but also because they represent an early incarnation of some of the aesthetic
ideas that came to characterize the Romantic movement (Gaskill 1994). Ossian carried
across Europe not only an idea of Scotland, but also Scottish ideas, and is therefore an
obvious starting point for this chapter.
The Poems of Ossian took their raw materials from the Gaelic heritage of Highland
Scotland, but the form and tone of the published texts were shaped by the Scottish
Enlightenment. Macpherson grew up in the Highlands, experiencing the devastation
surrounding the 1745 Jacobite Rising, but his literary aspirations developed at
Aberdeen, where he sat at the feet of distinguished philosophers, imbibing an
admiration for classical literature and a sense of ‘‘the various purposes it serves in
Life’’ (Gerard 1755: 28).4 If The Poems of Ossian can in some ways be seen as a reaction
against the heavily utilitarian emphasis of his university education, they are also, in
part, a natural consequence. For it is unlikely that Macpherson would have attempted
to publish translations of the poetry circulating in his local community, had it not
been for the primitivist ideals and fascination with early literatures that he acquired as
a student, and shared with the influential figures he subsequently encountered in
Edinburgh.
At Aberdeen, under the influence of Thomas Blackwell, the study of classical
literature encouraged admiration for the physical strength and spontaneous energy
of the earliest societies, whose vigor poured out in powerful poetry. A similar
preoccupation with antiquity stimulated intellectual debate in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where a proper understanding of the beginnings of human society was deemed
essential to modern progress. The brilliant thinkers who gathered in the intellectual
societies, including David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and Adam Ferguson,
were all fascinated by the origins of civil society, of political and economic systems,
racial difference and human behavior in general.5 The transformation of language,
especially, from its simplest articulations to the complexity of modern prose, seemed
central to human development; and linguistic theories drew variously on classical
52
Fiona Stafford
texts and evidence from contemporary travelers. James Burnet, Lord Monboddo,
examined accounts of peoples as diverse as the Polynesians and the Hurons in his
ambitious, six-volume analysis Of the Origins and Progress of Language (1773-92).
Spatial and temporal differences were often similarly conflated, as remote, contemporary societies came to be regarded as living representations of the savage or
barbarous stages of humankind.
Such enthusiastic research into the origins of civilization, into ancient languages
and alternative societies, inevitably stimulated interest in the history of Britain and
Ireland, and the indigenous Celtic languages. For the Highland student, James
Macpherson, exposure to the research interests of modern Scottish scholars meant,
paradoxically, a return to the traditional culture of his Gaelic-speaking home. In the
Highlands and islands of Scotland, one of the oldest known languages was still in
daily use, while the heroic legends of the ancient Celts might yet be heard by the fire
during long winter nights. The collection and translation of traditional Gaelic
material was an obvious objective for Scottish intellectuals, eager at once to develop
their knowledge of social progress and to establish the superiority of Scotland to
England whenever the opportunity arose. Macpherson’s work on The Poems of Ossian
resulted from the complicated interweaving of his own Highland background with
contemporary academic interest in recovering some vestiges of ancient Scottish
society, a pursuit that seemed especially urgent as Highland culture receded rapidly
in the wake of Culloden, and the English language spread further and further north.
When Macpherson came to present his first renditions of Gaelic verse to the
English-speaking public, as Fragments of Ancient Poetry in June 1760, he naturally
emphasized their importance as records of early society. The epic poem that he hoped
to rescue as a result of further research was similarly presented as a precious relic
which ‘‘might serve to throw considerable light upon the Scottish and Irish antiquities’’ (Macpherson 1996: 6). Some 18 months later, Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem in Six
Books came suitably prefaced by a substantial ‘‘Dissertation concerning the Antiquity
of the Poems of Ossian,’’ and buttressed with extensive footnotes, drawing parallels
with classical epic and emphasizing the historical significance of the various poems.
‘‘The Songs of Selma,’’ for example, had a note describing the annual feast of the Bards
and the original social function of the verse. Whatever the public might think of the
poetry, it was clear that the translator expected his work to be judged by philosophical
and historical measures. Here was poetry that had possessed a central role in early
society, and which offered modern readers unique insight into the manners of their
ancestors.
Macpherson’s presentation of his translations was strongly influenced by his Edinburgh patrons, and especially Hugh Blair. As the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres in Edinburgh, Blair can be seen as Scotland’s first true literary critic, while his
work on Ossian is a foundational text for the distinguished reviewing culture of
Edinburgh in the Romantic period.6 For although Blair’s tone was very much more
sympathetic than that of later reviewers, such as Francis Jeffrey, his attitude to
literature was informed by a strong sense of its usefulness to society and importance
Scottish Romanticism
53
to the nation. The Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, originally published in
1763 to accompany Fingal, begins with a sociological justification for reading ancient
poems as a record of the early stages of modern nations. Almost immediately,
however, Blair introduced ideas of passion, feeling, and imagination, emphasizing
the ‘‘vehemence and fire’’ of the earliest poetry, and the ‘‘picturesque and figurative’’
quality of its language (Blair 1996: 345). Rather than presenting an opposition
between artistic creation and social function, Blair argued that the usefulness of
ancient poetry lay in its expression of imaginative freedom and undisguised passion.
Blair, though a minister of the High Church and a university professor, employed his
critical skills not for nipping early poetry in the bud, as later readers might expect,
but rather for nurturing a sympathetic understanding of its true value. Although he
adopted a broadly historical approach to Ossian, reverting frequently to speculation on
the ‘‘infancy of society,’’ Blair’s Critical Dissertation was also promoting a new kind of
poetry, based on aesthetic ideals that diverged significantly from the neo-Classicism of
the previous century.
Blair’s elevation of conciseness, simplicity, and figurative language over diffuseness,
artful transitions, and abstract personification mark an important turn in the tide of
literary taste. His emphasis on language that is at once limited in range, and yet
profoundly moving, looks forward to ideas later developed by Wordsworth in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads. His celebration of natural man living closely in touch with
his landscape (‘‘the desart,’’ says Fingal, ‘‘is enough for me, with all its woods and
deer,’’ Blair 1996: 354) also corresponded closely to the new Rousseauistic admiration
for humankind uncorrupted by modern urban lifestyles and commercial values. Above
all, Blair saw in Ossian the ideal of sublimity, which had so recently been analyzed by
Edmund Burke, and which would become central to German Romantic aesthetic
thought, after Kant.7 Sublimity was the keynote of the ancient bard of Scotland, and
although Blair emphasized the moral character of the Ossianic sublime, his prose
warms to the idea of a natural genius in native surroundings:
Amidst the rude scenes of nature, amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles,
dwells the sublime. It is the thunder and lightning of genius. It is the offspring of
nature, not of art. It is negligent of all the lesser graces, and perfectly consistent with a
certain noble disorder. It associates naturally with that grave and solemn spirit, which
distinguishes our author. (Blair 1996: 395)8
The ancient Bard was not only passionate and spontaneous, but also grave and solemn:
a prophetic figure, whose words resonated with the sublime authority of natural
power. Since the sublime dwelt in the ruder scenes of nature, the mountains of
Scotland were the perfect setting.
As sublimity became celebrated more widely, and the taste for rocks and torrents
and whirlwinds grew, so did the popularity of Ossian. Throughout Europe, readers
were enraptured by the strange rhythmic prose and the distinctive melancholy tone.
Macpherson may have presented ‘‘The Songs of Selma’’ as an example of an interesting
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old custom, but for many of his readers it was the poetry that mattered: ‘‘Star of the
descending night! Fair is thy light in the west! Thou liftest thy unshorn head from
thy cloud: thy steps are stately on thy hill. What dost thou behold in the plain? The
stormy winds are laid. The murmur of the torrent comes from afar. Roaring waves
climb the distant rocks’’ (Macpherson 1996: 166). This was the very poem that
Goethe translated and presented to Friederike Brion, and which, in his 1774 Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers, he made the sorrowful Werther read with Lotte shortly
before his suicide (see Lamport 1998). And while Werther is perhaps not exactly an
ideal reader, the way in which Goethe incorporates Ossian into his hugely popular
sentimental novel is symptomatic of its appeal in the late eighteenth century. Not
only were people reading the texts, but many were also sufficiently enthused to
compose imitations, fresh translations, and dramatic adaptations. Nor was the creative
impulse confined to writers: artists from Cotman and Kauffman to Ingres and Turner
painted Ossianic subjects, while Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Schumann were
among the many musicians inspired by Ossian (Okun 1967, Fiske 1983, Daverio
1998). With every fresh creative response came a renewed idea of Romantic Scotland.
At the same time, Macpherson’s texts provoked enormous and long-running
critical controversy. For every reader enchanted by Ossian, there must have been
another who regarded the translations as fraudulent, their antiquity incredible. The
controversy over the authenticity took so long to resolve that the issue was still being
debated in the pages of the Edinburgh Review some 40 years after the original
publications.9 If Blair’s Critical Dissertation did much to foster the development of
literary appreciation in Scotland, the disagreement over the authenticity and ultimate
value of Ossian gave rise to a much more hard-hitting style of critical judgment.
Macpherson’s work represents a curious fusion of the imaginative and utilitarian
strains in Scottish culture, but its reception also reveals deep divisions between a
sentimental enthusiasm on one hand, and a very unsentimental skepticism on the
other.
Scottish Romanticism
For late eighteenth-century readers, Ossian’s poems revealed man in his natural
condition – rooted in his native landscape and expressing powerful, but often tender
emotions in the simple language that flowed from his heart. At the same time, the
dominant voice was that of an old man lamenting the times of old, while the
Highland landscape is blasted with images of ruin and desolation. This pervading
sense of loss and imminent oblivion was an important part of Ossian’s appeal to an age
of sensibility. It was also quietly reassuring to readers who might still harbor fears of
the wild Highlands for physical or political reasons. The elegiac nature of Ossian’s
poems nevertheless gave Scotland’s claim to literary greatness a somewhat insubstantial and backward-looking air. The Celtic Bard was trapped in antiquity, his broken
poems – or ‘‘Fragments’’ – accessible only through Macpherson’s notoriously unreli-
Scottish Romanticism
55
able English translations. Many of the qualities admired by readers of Ossian, however,
found new vitality and contemporary significance in the work of Scotland’s greatest
Romantic poet: Robert Burns.
Burns responded to the new aesthetic appetite by creating poems that brimmed
with feeling and celebrated a close and fruitful relationship with nature. Everything
in Burns’s work was fresh, fertile, and concrete. Unlike the venerable, but somewhat
decrepit, Ossian, Burns was a self-styled ‘‘simple Bard’’ reveling in the here and now,
and making poems from everyday Scottish life.10 If Blair’s critical ideas anticipated
later Romantic poetic manifestos, Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock in 1786, demonstrated the new ideals in
action. Here was ‘‘low and rustic life’’ in all its glory, captured in poetry that expressed
the essential passions and aimed explicitly to ‘‘touch the heart’’ (Wordsworth 1992:
60, ‘‘Epistle to John Lapraik, An Old Scotch Bard,’’ in Burns 1968, I: 87). Burns was a
man, speaking to others in the real language of rural Scotland, as his series of verse
epistles to other local poets makes clear:
But Mauchline Race Or Mauchline Fair,
I should be proud to meet you there;
We’se gie ae’ night’s discharge to care,
If we forgather,
An’ hae a swap o’rhymin-ware,
Wi’ ane anither. (‘‘Epistle to John Lapraik’’ Burns 1968, I: 88)
Burns creates a poetry of democratic sociability, which reflects the colloquial language
of his home and remains grounded insistently in his local area. He admired Ossian,
but his own work drew on the very different traditions of Lowland Scotland: ‘‘The
Epistle to J. L***k,’’ for example, draws on Allan Ramsay’s sequence of verse epistles,
which had similarly debated the nature of Scottish poetry in the distinctive stanzas
known as ‘‘Standard Habbie’’ (Ramsay 1974).11
At a time when many Scottish writers were laboring to demonstrate their skills in
elegant standard English, Burns’s feisty celebration of Scottish forms and words is a
striking statement of independence. Part of Ossian’s appeal to the Edinburgh literati
was that as an English translation from Gaelic, the published poems conformed to
acceptable linguistic standards, while remaining essentially Scottish. Burns, on the
other hand, advertised his country’s spoken language in his very choice of title. The
opening poem in his groundbreaking collection did include an Ossianic speaker, but
rather than adopt the lofty, melancholic tones of Macpherson, Burns set up a comic
canine dialogue between the local landowner’s dog, Caesar, and the ploughman’s
collie, Luath, named ‘‘After some dog in Highlan Sang,/ Was made lang syne, lord
knows how lang’’ (‘‘The Twa Dogs,’’ Burns 1968, I: 138). Although a suitable
footnote directs readers to ‘‘Ossian’s Fingal,’’ the satiric tone of the verse makes it
clear that for this poet, contemporary rural Scotland is far more interesting than thirdcentury Caledonia.
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In ‘‘The Vision,’’ too, the Ossianic divisions of poems into ‘‘Duans’’12 and the motif
of the visiting Muse are both undermined by her very physical entrance: ‘‘When click!
The string the snick did draw;/ And jee! The door gaed to the wa’ ’’ (Burns 1968, I:
104). Burns’s supernatural is carefully naturalized, as the speaker’s ‘‘musing-deep,
astonish’d stare’’ is answered by a Muse, Coila, who adopts ‘‘an elder Sister’s air.’’
Fraternal feelings soon give way to a different kind of admiration, once the Muse’s
tartan robe slips open to reveal ‘‘half a leg’’: the inspiration offered by Coila, though
political, literary, and serious, has a vital sexual dimension, rather similar to the
feeling inspired by ‘‘darling Jean’’ in the ‘‘Epistle to Davie, a brother poet.’’ Unlike the
sustained otherworldiness of Macpherson’s Celts, Burns treats supernatural figures
with an earthy enthusiasm or a brusque irreverence, as when the devil is addressed as
an ‘‘auld, snick-drawing dog,’’ who ‘‘came to Paradise incog’’ (‘‘Address to the Deil,’’
ibid.:171). In Burns’s comic masterpiece, ‘‘Tam o’Shanter,’’ Satan and sexuality are
conjured up with unforgettable energy in the mock-moral tale of drunken Tam.
Keats may have lamented the repressive influence of the ‘‘Kirkmen’’ on Burns, but
it is also possible to see these essential aspects of provincial Scottish society providing
a vital catalyst for his work. Burns’s most vigorous satires, such as ‘‘Holy Willie’s
Prayer’’ or ‘‘The Holy Fair’’ were responses to a certain brand of harsh Presbyterianism,
while his repeated celebration of whiskey, wit, and women derived much of their force
from a self-conscious outrageousness before po-faced morality. Nevertheless, as Liam
McIlvanney points out, it was Burns’s own Presbyterianism that had instilled in him
‘‘the principles of independence which animate his satires on the Kirk’’: his reaction
against the repression and hypocrisy of certain elders was part and parcel of his own
democratic faith (McIlvanney 2003: 162). The no-nonsense, argumentative strains in
Scottish culture emerge in Burns’s comic treatment of literary, religious, and social
convention, contributing a vital new tone to traditional material. Far from being
thwarted by his environment, Burns drew on and resisted the world around him; and
contemporary readers were compelled by the energy and varied tones of what they
assumed to be ‘‘simple’’ verse.
The comedy in Burns’s work was also a crucial enabler of sentiment, allowing him
to produce poems that were moving rather than mawkish. To write sympathetically
on the destruction of a mouse’s nest would be a challenge for any writer, but Burns
succeeds through addressing the dispossessed mouse as vigorously as he speaks to the
devil: ‘‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, / O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’’ (‘‘To
a Mouse,’’ Burns 1968, I: 127). The colloquial diction, the chiming rhyme, and the
bouncy rhythm of the lines keeps the sentiment in check, while allowing the poem to
develop into a startling meditation on the human condition. Burns’s poetry has
moments of profound melancholy: as Wordsworth observed, ‘‘His ‘Ode to Despondency’ I can never read without the deepest agitation’’ (letter to Coleridge, February 27,
1799, in Selincourt 1967, I: 255-6). But the feelings of despondency are all the deeper
for the sharply contrasting comic and satiric poems that lie around. Francis Jeffrey,
scourge of so many Romantic poets, praised Burns for both his comedy and his
‘‘simple and unpretending tenderness’’ (Jeffrey 1809). In an age which had spawned a
Scottish Romanticism
57
host of sentimental novels and poetic effusions, Burns possessed a rare ability to
convey tenderness in ways that rang true. For Hazlitt, Burns ‘‘was not a sickly
sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet,’’ but shared with Shakespeare ‘‘something of
the same magnanimity, directness and unaffected character’’ (Hazlitt ([1822] 1930-4,
5: 128). ‘‘Unpretending’’ and ‘‘unaffected’’ were key terms in the contemporary
reception of Burns, who increasingly stood for natural genius and native truth.
Given the critical elevation of naturalness, spontaneous expression, and distinctive
native character, it is perhaps unsurprising that in the eyes of both Hazlitt and Jeffrey,
Burns’s greatest legacy lay in his songs. The notion that music was part of humankind’s expressive nature, and that the earliest poetry had been accompanied by music,
was commonplace in Scottish Enlightenment thought and can also be seen in the
background of the Romantic critical response to Burns. In Hazlitt’s lecture ‘‘On
Poetry in General,’’ for example, he dwelt on the ‘‘connection between music and
deep-rooted passion,’’ and the capacity for lyrical poetry to utter emotions of the soul
(Hazlitt [1822] 1930-4, 5: 12). Later in the series, theory gave way to the living
examples of Burns’s love songs, which took ‘‘the deepest and most lasting hold of the
mind’’ (ibid.: 140). Celebration of Burns’s songs arose partly from the new postEnlightenment aesthetics, which were in turn affirmed and given concrete artistic
expression. Burns’s own fame in the Romantic period owed much to the widespread
interest in his hard life and premature death, but he lived on most persistently in
songs such as ‘‘My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose,’’ ‘‘Mary Morison,’’ or ‘‘John
Anderson.’’ Scottish song had been popular throughout Britain for at least a century
before Burns’s publications, but his contribution was unparalleled and took on new
life in nineteenth-century Europe when brilliant composers adapted his work. The
very qualities admired by Hazlitt and Jeffrey made his lyrics perfect for lieder, as
Roger Fiske has commented: ‘‘His genius was for crystallising a simple situation into
a moment of delight or sorrow’’ (Fiske 1983: 157). Burns’s work was also instrumental in the elevation of the Romantic lyric, as the pre-eminent genre for expressing the
deepest emotions, undisguised by artificial conventions.
Contemporary admiration for Burns’s songs stemmed partly from their connection
with local tradition. Throughout the eighteenth century, collections of Scottish song
had been gathered for publication by editors keen to demonstrate the value of native
art forms within the newly united kingdom of Great Britain. Songs and ballads were
part of the old oral tradition, which relied on living poets and singers to perform the
lyrics and pass them on to new generations. Often the authorship of a song had been
lost on its way through the centuries, and so it seemed to embody not only the prized
qualities of early poetry, but also the shared emotions and values of the community in
which it survived. For Hazlitt, Burns’s songs drew inspiration from the old ballads of
Scotland, which represented a vital link to the national past:
We seem to feel that those who wrote and sang them (the early minstrels) lived in the
open air, wandering on from place to place with restless feet and thoughts, and lending
an ever-open ear to the fearful accidents of war or love, floating on the breath of old
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tradition or common fame, and moving the strings of their harp with sounds that sank
into a nation’s heart. (Hazlitt [1822] 1930-4, 5: 140)
The qualities that Blackwell had imagined in Homer, and Blair had glimpsed
through the translations of Ossian, were now widely associated with the ‘‘early
minstrels’’ of the British Isles. Hazlitt’s enthusiasm reflects the late eighteenthcentury elevation of the minstrel figure, which followed Percy’s important collection
of traditional ballads, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). A much more immediate and specifically Scottish influence, however, was Sir Walter Scott, whose literary
fame was founded on his own collection, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
Scott, like Burns and Macpherson, had, from his earliest days, absorbed the legends
and songs of his local area. His decision to publish an edition of Border poetry was
similarly prompted by current literary interests, however, and especially by the vogue
for Gothic ballads in the 1790s. As Scott translated some of Bürger’s popular ballads
and assisted Matthew Lewis in the compilation of Tales of Wonder, he recognized the
possibility of a wider audience for the songs and stories of his own country. While
Lewis was interested in ballads for their sensational stories and market value, Scott’s
activities as a collector and creator were part of his deep attachment to the land where
his family had lived for generations. The growing interest in the Scottish Highlands
also strengthened Scott’s determination to record and publicize the distinctive ballads
of the Lowlands. Macpherson had seen the effect on Gaelic poetry of the rapid changes
in eighteenth-century Highland life; Scott was similarly aware of the fragility of the
popular poetry of the Borders. The survival of oral literature required performers
capable of memorizing, adapting, and carrying the old songs into the minds and
hearts of new audiences. In his introduction to the Minstrelsy, Scott described the
‘‘town-pipers’’ of the Border towns, who used to spend the spring and harvest
traveling through the local district, entertaining the community with songs (Scott
1931: 65-6). The footnotes signal the end of a long tradition, however, as they record
the recent deaths of Robin Hastie, the last town-piper of Jedburgh, and John Graeme,
‘‘the last of our professed ballad reciters.’’ What Scott was attempting to preserve in
his edition was a long-lived, but suddenly doomed tradition. He was, in a sense,
taking on the role of the vanished minstrel or town-piper, and transmitting the
ancient ballads to new homes.
Like the intellectuals who had sent Macpherson into the Highlands to recover what
was left of ancient Gaelic poetry, Scott’s aim was partially preservation. Like Macpherson, too, he encouraged a rational, historical approach to the ballads, by prefacing
his collection with a substantial essay on the history and manners of the Borders, and
introducing individual pieces with contextual detail. And like Macpherson, again, his
editing involved some creative embellishment. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border included
not only traditional ballads, such as ‘‘The Twa’ Corbies,’’ ‘‘The Battle of Otterbourne,’’
or ‘‘Johnny Armstrong,’’ but also more recent imitations and songs such as Jean
Elliot’s ‘‘Flowers of the Forest.’’ Although he has been criticized for some of these
editorial decisions, the immediate popularity of the volume and the demand for an
Scottish Romanticism
59
expanded edition show that Scott’s desire to widen the admiration for Border songs
was rapidly fulfilled.
Scott’s Minstrelsy was among a number of important collections that combined to
make Scottish song one of the nation’s most important contributions to European
Romanticism. It also demonstrates once more the importance of the local oral
traditions to the most successful Scottish writers of the period. For Scott’s own
narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, grew directly from his work as a ballad
collector, and, like the Minstrelsy, carried Border legend into thousands of contemporary homes. Its astonishing success prompted Scott to turn to the emotive topic of
Flodden Field for Marmion, before moving further north to the Trossachs for the story
of The Lady of the Lake. The huge success of Scott’s novels eventually eclipsed the fame
of his poetry, but in the early nineteenth century, Scott’s long, narrative poems were
phenomenal best sellers. Nor should his later development as a novelist be seen as a
move away from poetry. For Scott, collection and creation, verse and prose, were all
complementary, and his best work combined the various facets of his talent. Scott’s
biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, particularly admired the introductory essays in the
Minstrelsy, and records John Wilson’s comment on the public excitement over the
anonymity of Waverley: ‘‘I wonder what all these people are perplexing themselves
with: Have they forgotten the prose of the Minstrelsy?’’ (Lockhart 1882, II: 132).
Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was full of prose passages; his first novel,
Waverley, is packed with references to poetry. The young hero, Edward Waverley, is
‘‘wild and romantic . . . with a strong disposition towards poetry,’’ and is therefore
primed to enjoy the old ballads he hears from David Gellatly and relish the stirring
Highland songs of Flora MacIvor (Scott 1981: 56). Scattered throughout the narrative
are snatches of ‘‘Chevy Chase,’’ ‘‘Charlie is my Darling,’’ ‘‘Hardiknut,’’ and a host of
other songs and ballads, which root the fiction firmly in the familiar tradition of
Scottish song. At the same time, the novel includes alternative perspectives, such as
that of Baron Bradwardine, who ‘‘piqued himself upon stalking through life with the
same upright, starched, stoical gravity’’ and whose literary tastes are diametrically
opposed to Waverley’s (ibid.). Scott is also at pains to check popular Romantic
stereotyping of the Highlanders, making Fergus MacIvor observe, ‘‘A simple and
unsublimed taste now, like my own, would prefer the jet d’eau at Versailles to this
cascade with all its accompaniments of rock and roar’’ (ibid.: 109). Far from conforming to Ossianic ideals, Fergus is witty, sophisticated and ‘‘unsublimed.’’
The flexible form of the novel allowed Scott to combine both the powerful
imaginative attractions of the Highlands and the more skeptical, comic tone that
was equally characteristic of Scottish culture, in one internally varied work. The
different elements fuse to generate a dynamic narrative that is comic and yet moving,
entertaining but still serious. As in the poetry of Burns, where comedy enables
sentiment, Scott’s gently ironic and self-consciously literary tone allows for the
inclusion of moments of high Romantic fantasy and also of deep melancholy. The
almost Shandyan touch of ‘‘Postscript, which should have been a Preface’’ lightens
the final revelation of the novel’s underlying purpose, which is strongly reminiscent of
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his earlier efforts as a collector of poems. In the closing pages, readers discover that
Waverley, like the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, arose from Scott’s attachment to his
native country, and his acute sense of massive and irreversible transformation: ‘‘There
is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has
undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland’’ (Scott 1981: 340).
Scott’s desire to record the details of his changing nation drove him to write novel
after novel, each drawing energy from the great variety of Scottish life, history, and
landscapes. The fluidity of prose fiction allowed him to introduce a huge cast of
characters from every area, class, and period, and to incorporate the multiple voices
and forms of contemporary Scotland. Scott’s prolific publication and enormous
popularity did much to establish the novel as the major literary genre of the
nineteenth century. He also made Scotland a subject for fiction, just as Maria Edgeworth had presented Ireland in her influential novels of Irish life. Scott’s example was
followed by John Galt, who helped to popularize the subgenre of the ‘‘regional novel’’
in his appealing depictions of rural Ayrshire, Annals of the Parish (1821). Far more
innovative, however, was the work of James Hogg, who mirrored Scott by rising to
fame as a poet before becoming increasingly known for his prose fiction.
Hogg was a collector of traditional Scottish stories and supplied Scott with many
Border ballads for the Minstrelsy. His own writing plays persistently on the borders
between collecting and creating, mixing traditional tales with his own compositions
and frequently assuming different roles for his poetic and prose narratives. His Winter
Evening Tales (Hogg 2002) for example, a volume of regional short stories and novellas
published in 1820, is advertised as a series ‘‘Collected among the Cottagers in the
South of Scotland,’’ as if to cast Hogg as an editor rather than an author. In his most
famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the
‘‘editor’s narrative’’ is almost as long as the sinner’s memoir, so that the two accounts
comment on each other, refusing any single perspective or conclusive judgment.
Authorship in Hogg’s work is repeatedly questioned, with the responsibility for the
narrative being deferred to untraceable origins. Although the contemporary image of
Hogg as the ‘‘Ettrick Shepherd’’ smacks of late eighteenth-century aesthetic ideas of
natural individuals in rural surroundings, Hogg’s originality lies in his highly
sophisticated challenges to the very idea of an author as the single-handed creator
of a text. Hogg’s fiction, like Scott’s, celebrates the variousness of Scottish life, but
where Scott generally developed a consistent omniscient narrator, Hogg frequently
disguises any separate narrative voice and makes the teller an integral part of the tale.
If Scott included characters who represented different strands in Scottish society,
Hogg chose to adopt their very voices, setting the words of the manic ‘‘sinner’’ against
the apparently objective account of the mysterious ‘‘editor.’’ Hogg was as alert to the
contradictory impulses of his environment as any writer of the period and in a torrent
of unpredictable poems, short stories, and novels, he reflected the full complexity of
Romantic Scotland.
Scottish Romanticism
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Scotland in Romanticism
The compelling idea of Scotland in the Romantic period derived not only from
Scottish pens and presses, but also from the descriptions published by visitors.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, as mountain scenery became more fashionable and Highland travel safer, people were drawn to see for themselves the
magnificent scenery of north-western Scotland. Although there were earlier accounts,
such as Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands, it was not until the 1770s
that travel in Highland Scotland began to seem a realistic possibility for those
unfamiliar with the region. Smollett’s fictional travelogue, The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker, and Samuel Johnson’s own account of his Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland did much to arouse interest in Scotland, while the descriptions published by
the naturalist, Thomas Pennant, and the picturesque tourist, William Gilpin, guided
armchair travelers to the most remarkable scenes. Pennant’s Tour, for example,
included Joseph Banks’s description of the phenomenal caves in the Hebridean island
of Staffa, which came as a revelation to him and to subsequent readers: ‘‘Compared to
this what are the cathedrals or palaces built by men!’’ Banks exclaimed, ‘‘Mere models
or playthings, imitations as diminutive as his works will always be when compared to
those of nature’’ (Pennant 1774: 262). The secrets of the western islands were being
unveiled to the reading public for the first time, and seemed to surpass any of the
known wonders of Britain. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Keats visited
Fingal’s Cave in 1818, he was almost as astonished by the number of tourists as by the
natural wonder that had attracted them to Staffa:
’Tis now free to stupid face
To cutters and to fashion boats,
To cravats and to petticoats. (‘‘Not Aladin Magian,’’ Keats 1970: 375)
In spite of his dismay, however, Keats was profoundly struck by his journey; the
images he garnered rapidly bore fruit in his great epic fragment ‘‘Hyperion,’’ where
the fallen Titans lie on ‘‘Couches of rugged stone,’’ surrounded by the ‘‘solid roar/ Of
thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse’’ (ibid.: 416).
The interest in Fingal’s Cave demonstrates the multiple attractions of Romantic
Scotland; for while many were following Banks’s scientific lead and visiting a
remarkable geological phenomenon, the popularity and controversy surrounding
Ossian gave special interest to any site associated with the ancient Celtic heroes. Staffa
is one of the highlights of Sarah Murray’s A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties
of Scotland, published in 1799 to assist intrepid travelers. In a breathless description of
her visit, excitement over Ossian mingles with amazement at the physical spectacle, ‘‘I
was almost overcome with astonishment and delight, on viewing the parts around the
outside of the boat cave, and I remained in silent amazement at every succeeding
object that met the eye’’ (Murray 1982: 133). The thrill of visiting the cave of the
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ancient Celtic hero is only one element of an excitement, mounting at the sight of the
physical formations: ‘‘a round projection of most beautiful compact prisms descending
from the magnificent crown or dome of small pillars in every direction . . . to a solid
rough base of basaltes.’’ Science and poetry united in Staffa, and visitors were
staggered by the force of the feelings aroused. Ossianic sublimity found its natural
counterpart in Fingal’s Cave, but the emotion induced in countless Romantic visitors,
like Sarah Murray, was religious wonder: ‘‘Never shall I forget the sublime, heavenlike sensations with which Fingal’s Cave inspired me . . . Staffa produced the highest
pitch of solemn, pious, enthusiastic sensation I ever felt or ever can feel in this my
house of clay.’’
The solemnity of the Scottish landscape frequently elicited religious language from
its visitors. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland in 1803
includes a number of almost visionary moments, when the restlessness of the journey
is stilled, and the scene sinks into the memory. Unlike Sarah Murray’s excitement over
the physical landscape, however, the scenes that moved Dorothy Wordsworth most
deeply were often those in which a solitary human figure is silhouetted against an
austere hillside. As she crossed a bleak, treeless tract in the Borders, she saw her first
Highlander, dressed in his bonnet and grey plaid and recalls the ‘‘scriptural solemnity
in this man’s figure, a sober simplicity which was most impressive’’ (Selincourt 1941,
I: 214). A few miles later on, she was even more struck by a shepherd boy: ‘‘on a bare
moor, alone with his sheep, standing, as he did, in utter quietness and silence, there
was something uncommonly impressive in his appearance, a solemnity which recalled
to our minds the old man in the corn-field’’ (ibid.: 216). The Wordsworths’ tour of
Scotland, like Keats’s later trip, was largely a literary pilgrimage to the places
associated with Burns, Ossian, Wallace, and the Border songs and ballads. What
they found in Scotland, however, was not just confirmation of the reality of places and
people that had lived in their imaginations for many years. Dorothy’s Journal, and the
poems written by Wordsworth, reveal a journey that was literary in its inspiration –
and in its results. In addition to verses written after visiting the grave of Burns, or on
not visiting the famous river Yarrow, there are poems which, like the journal, record
memorable encounters and local stories. Wordsworth’s celebration of Scotland in his
Poems in Two Volumes added greatly to the attraction of Scotland in the Romantic
period, and for later travelers such as Keats, the visit to Burns’s country was deepened
by the knowledge that the Wordsworths and Coleridge had also made the journey and
added their own contribution to the idea of Romantic Scotland.
Although the Scotland that emerges from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections more
than fulfills the contemporary expectation of solemn scenery, mysterious figures, mist
and mountains, such Romantic motifs do not make up the whole picture. In addition
to the visual delights, imaginative fascination, and physical hardship, she also records
numerous references to friendly encounters and generous hospitality. Though hampered by their inability to speak Gaelic, the Wordsworths came away with memories
not just of striking figures on hillsides, but also of warm welcomes and human
anecdotes. Nor was their literary pilgrimage confined to graves, as is clear from the
Scottish Romanticism
63
account of the happy meeting with Scott, who recited part of his unpublished Lay of
the Last Minstrel.
As Scott’s fame grew, enabling him to purchase and improve a large house on the
banks of the Tweed, Abbotsford became something of a magnet for literary tourists.
Not only Wordsworth, but also Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans, Maria Edgeworth,
Thomas Moore, and Washington Irving were entertained at Abbotsford, while Hogg,
Lockhart, Constable, and Ballantyne were regular visitors. Scott turned himself into a
Scottish laird and his house into a baronial castle, packed with heraldic decorations
and suits of armor. As Mark Girouard has observed, ‘‘the romanticism which produced
Scott’s novels and the romanticism which turned him into a Scottish laird were
essential to each other’’ (Girouard 1981: 40). It may be a Romanticism that seems
far removed from the radical, democratic thrust of so much Romantic writing, but it
is just as much part of the period and evolves from a similar late eighteenth-century
enthusiasm for a heroic past where people lived close to nature. For the pursuit of
nature in the Romantic period meant not only admiration of spectacular scenery or of
simple people in rural surroundings, but also hunting, shooting, and fishing. Those
who visited Scott were as likely to be drawn by the salmon fishing or the famous
Abbotsford Hunt as by his poetry.
While Romantic tourists set off for Scotland in search of waterfalls, rocks, and
poetic flights, many journeyed north attracted by reports of rich fare and abundant
game. Gilpin may have guided readers towards the romantic banks of the Tay, but
tour-writers such as Colonel Thornton were sharing first-hand knowledge of the
ptarmigan, grouse, and deer. If Wordsworth was moved by the poverty and simplicity
of life in rural Scotland, Thornton was struck by its luxury ‘‘what few possess,
viz. roebucks, cairvauns, hare, black game, dottrel, white game, partridges, ducks
and snipes; salmon, pike, trout, char, par, lampreys and eels’’ (Thornton [1804]
1974: 227).
Determined tourists traveled to Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, attracted by Scottish poetry and novels and by the descriptions written
by earlier visitors. Undeterred by demanding terrain and challenging weather, they
followed routes familiar from their reading, and yet responded very variously to what
they saw. While many were deeply moved by the mountain landscapes and sublime
solemnity of Scotland, others were satisfied by the physical rewards of walking,
riding, and blood sports. Some were excited by seeing the habitat and behavior of
unfamiliar birds and animals, others were more interested in how they tasted. The
Scots themselves, who live on in their own writings and in writings about them,
regarded their country in equally diverse ways: while some drew endless inspiration
from their land and its traditions, others moved away, returning only through books.
Romantic Scotland was at once a wild place where the imagination could roam
freely, and a barren landscape inhabited largely by the wildlife. It was both an
intellectual powerhouse, where educated people tackled the obstacles to modern
progress energetically, and a country characterized by religious austerity and opposition to change. It was a place where people gathered to exchange views and
64
Fiona Stafford
friendship, and an underpopulated land renowned for the solitariness of its people.
United with England since 1707, it was a nation increasingly proud of its distinctive
achievements, and yet burdened by a sense of linguistic inferiority and physical
remoteness. Though apparently consisting of oppositions and contrasts, the Scotland
of Romanticism is really multifaceted: shifting, dazzling, and as various as its
weather. Since Romanticism is itself notoriously elusive and open to debate, Scotland
offers numerous possibilities for further exploration of the Romantic movement – and
the Romantic period.
Notes
1 ‘‘l’imagination du Nord, celle qui plaı̂t sur le
bord de la mer, au bruit des vents, dans les
bruyères sauvages’’ (de Staël 1820: 258;
Hazlitt, ibid.).
2 Letter to Tom Keats, July 7, 1818, in Keats
(1958, I: 319).
3 Byron (1980-93, I: 242). On the contemporary Scottish reviewers, see Demata and Wu
(2002).
4 For fuller discussion, see Stafford (1988: 2439).
5 For a useful introduction, see Broadie (1997),
Sher (1985).
6 On the importance of Scottish literary criticism in this period, and Blair in particular, see
Crawford (1992, 1998).
7 Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful was
published in 1757; Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful
was published in 1764, though his mature
analysis, published in 1790 in The Critique of
Judgement is more familiar to Romanticists. For
useful discussion and other important texts, see
Ashfield and de Bolla (1996).
8 On the importance of the Celtic Bard for ideas
of national identity, see Katie Trumpener’s
excellent study, Bardic Nationalism (1997).
9 In 1805, two major publications relating to
the controversy appeared: Henry Mackenzie
(ed.), Report of the Highland Society of Scotland.
Appointed to Enquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian; and Malcolm Laing
(ed.), The Poems of Ossian &c, containing the
Poetical Works of James Macpherson. Walter
Scott reviewed the Report in the Edinburgh
Review, VI (1805): 429-62.
10 The epigraph on the title page of Burns’s
Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786) read: ‘‘The Simple Bard, unbroken by rules of Art, / He pours the wild
effusions of the heart: / And if inspir’d, ’tis
Nature’s powers inspire; / Her’s all the melting thrill and her’s the kindling fire.’’
11 On the ‘‘Standard Habbie,’’ later known as
the ‘‘Burns stanza,’’ see Dunn (1997).
12 As Burns (1968) notes, ‘‘Duan, a term of
Ossian’s for the different divisions of a digressive Poem.’’ See his Cath Loda, vol. 2 of
MacPherson’s translation.
References and Further Reading
Ashfield, Andrew and de Bolla, Peter (eds.)
(1996). The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Blair, Hugh (1996). ‘‘A Critical Dissertation on the
Poems of Ossian.’’ In James Macpherson, The
Poems of Ossian, ed. Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, pp. 343-400.
Scottish Romanticism
Broadie, Alexander (ed.) (1997). The Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Burns, Robert (1968). The Poems and Songs of Robert
Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Byron, Lord (1980-93). English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. In Jerome J. McGann (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Crawford, Robert (1992). Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Crawford, Robert (ed.) (1998). The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Daverio, John (1998). ‘‘Schumann’s Ossianic Manner.’’ Nineteenth-Century Music, 21 (3): 247-73.
Demata, Massimiliano and Wu, Duncan (eds.)
(2002). British Romanticism and the Edinburgh
Review. London: Palgrave.
Dunn, Douglas (1997). ‘‘ ‘A Very Scottish Kind of
Dash’: Burns’s Native Metric.’’ In Robert Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 5885.
Fiske, Roger (1983). Scotland in Music: An European Enthusiasm. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Gaskill, Howard (1994). ‘‘Ossian in Europe.’’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 21: 64454.
Gerard, Alexander (1755). A Plan of Education in
the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen.
Aberdeen: James Chalmers.
Girouard, Mark (1981). The Return to Camelot:
Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Hazlitt, William ([1822] 1930-4). The Complete
Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21
vols. London and Toronto: Dent.
Hogg, James (2002). Winter Evening Tales, ed. Ian
Duncan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Jeffrey, Francis (1809). ‘‘Review of R. H. Cromek,
Reliques of Robert Burns.’’ Edinburgh Review, 13:
249-76.
Keats, John (1958). The Letters of John Keats, ed.
Hyder Rollins, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Keats, John (1970). The Poems of John Keats, ed.
Miriam Allott. London: Longman.
65
Lamport, Francis (1998). ‘‘Goethe, Ossian and
Werther.’’ In Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill
(eds.), From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi,
pp. 97-106.
Lockhart, John Gibson (1882). Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, 10 vols. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black.
McIlvanney, Liam (2003). Burns the Radical: Poetry
and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland.
East Linton, UK: Tuckwell.
Macpherson, James (1996). The Poems of Ossian, ed.
Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Murray, Sarah (1982). A Companion and Useful
Guide to the Beauties of Scotland, ed. W. F. Laughlan. Hawick, UK: Byway Books.
Okun, H. (1967). ‘‘Ossian in Painting.’’ Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 30:
327-56.
Pennant, Thomas (1774). ‘‘Account of Staffa.’’ In
A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides.
Chester: John Monk.
Ramsay, Allan (1974). ‘‘Familiar Epistles between
Lieutenant William Hamilton and Allan Ramsay.’’ In A. M. Kinghorn and A. Law (eds.),
Poems by Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson.
Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic
Press, pp. 17-27.
Scott, Walter ([1802-3) 1931). Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border, ed. Thomas Henderson. London:
Harrap.
Scott, Walter (1981). Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years
Since, ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Selincourt, Ernest de (ed.) (1941). The Journals of
Dorothy Wordsworth, 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
Selincourt, Ernest de (ed.) (1978). The Letters of
William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years,
Part I, 1821-1828, rev. edn. Alan G. Hill.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Sher, Richard B. (1985). Church and University in
the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Staël, Germaine de (1820). De la Littérature, considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales.
In Œuvres complètes de Mme la baronne de Staël, 8
vols., vol. IV. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz.
Stafford, Fiona (1988). The Sublime Savage: James
Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
66
Fiona Stafford
Thornton, Thomas ([1804] 1974). ‘‘A Sporting
Tour Through the Northern Parts of England
and the Highlands of Scotland.’’ In A.
J. Younson (ed.), Beyond the Highland Line: 3
Journals of Travel in Eighteenth Century Scotland.
London: Collins, pp. 207-47.
Trumpener, Katie (1997). Bardic Nationalism: The
Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wordsworth, William ([1800] 1992). Preface to
Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason. London:
Longman.
4
Byron’s Influence on European
Romanticism
Peter Cochran
In 1837 Adam Mickiewicz wrote:
The epoch between 1815 and 1830 was a happy one for poets. After the great war, Europe,
tired of battles and congresses, bulletins and protocols, seemed to become disgusted with
the real, sad world, and lifted its eyes towards what it thought of as the ideal world. At
that point Byron appeared. Rapidly, in the regions of the imagination, he took over the
place which the Emperor had recently occupied in the regions of reality. Destiny, which
had never ceased to furnish Napoleon with pretexts for continual warfare, favoured Byron
with a long peace. During his poetic reign, no great event occurred to distract the
attention of Europe, wholly taken up with its English reading. (Swidzinski 1991: 9)
The Byron around whom the second most powerful myth in nineteenth-century
Europe formed was not the author of those poems which we most value today. This
is not just because Don Juan, Beppo, and The Vision of Judgement are harder to translate
than Childe Harold, The Giaour, or Manfred (though they do seem to be) but because
the myth which they partially contradict was already too well developed across Europe
when Byron wrote them. His letters, too, which we regard so highly, were unknown
to all but their recipients before 1830 – and even then they were published in
incomplete texts.
Amédée Pichot’s prose translations of Byron1 constituted the most important
vehicle for the dissemination of the poet’s reputation through Europe, a process
which they initiated, in part, during his lifetime. Their relationship with Byron’s
real corpus is good in outline, useless in terms of style and tone; but great writers,
being great readers, could, if they had no English, see past their monotony and intuit
what the original must be like. This seems especially the case with Pushkin, whom I
take to be the greatest writer of the period.
Lamartine, Musset, and Pushkin all got to know Byron through Pichot. Goethe,
Heine, de Vigny, Espronceda, Lermontov, and Stendhal, however, having English,
68
Peter Cochran
would have disdained doing so – and when Mickiewicz gave Pushkin a single-volume
Byron it was an English-language edition, published by Brœnner of Frankfurt.
Mickiewicz translated Byron from the original. But Pichot’s, while not the best
translation of Byron, remains historically the most important. It seems likely to me
– though I can’t prove it – that several ‘‘translations’’ into other languages were
created from it.
Byron – or rather, European Byronism – seems to have answered two needs: the
need for what was perceived as a revolutionary voice, both literary and political, with
which to identify, and the need for what was perceived as a similar revolutionary voice
from which to recoil in horror. His heroes – Harold, Selim, Conrad, and so on – who
in truth pose no great threat to any political establishment, were read and recreated
eagerly as if they did. Manfred, whose protagonist, in not relying on the Devil to
destroy himself, and in rejecting Christian solace to save himself, really did pose an
ideological threat to the establishment, was read even more eagerly. As George Sand
writes, Manfred is ‘‘ . . . Faust délivré de l’odieuse compagnie de Méphistophélès’’
(Faust delivered from the odious company of Mephistopheles; Sand 1839: 612).
Byron’s life, as it was understood via international rumor, added the thrill of
mysterious personal transgressions – even Goethe thought Byron was a murderer
(Goethe 1970, II ii: 186-9). Don Juan, in changing the world’s perception of Byron’s
solemnity, did nothing to change its perception of his radicalism; and his sensational
death in Greece capped all of the foregoing with an unanswerable martyrdom in one
of the very causes he had been seen to propagate.
The myth of Byron was multifold – like Don Juan, he was all things to all people.
He was, to some, a posturing dandy of magnificent panache; to others, a poet of
passion and guilt such as had not been read, in any language, since Shakespeare; to
others, reading Manfred, a soul defying all powers, both celestial and infernal, to the
point of death and beyond – it is difficult for us today to appreciate the impact the
play had. To others, he was one who had rejected the certainties of the Enlightenment,
substituting for them, not so much an alternative certainty, as a variety of new ways in
which to express the profoundest uncertainty. As Richard Cardwell puts it, ‘‘[Byron’s
work] opposed the central presumption which underlies the history of Western
civilisation, that to the central questions about the nature and purpose of men’s
lives, about morals, about death, and the hereafter, true, objective, universal and
eternal answers could be found’’ (Cardwell 1997: 9).
To other observers, Byron was the greatest living critic of political chicanery and
hypocrisy, and the greatest prophet of the doom of imperialism, at a time, after 1815,
when chicanery, hypocrisy, and imperialism seemed to rule all Europe; lastly, he was
an active champion of freedom against oppression, who passed the final test: he put
his life where his words were, and died for his beliefs. Paul Trueblood writes:
‘‘ . . . Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824 had a catalytic effect on the struggle for
political liberty and nationalism throughout Europe . . . More than the writings of any
other major Romantic poet Byron’s political poetry. . . reflects the revolutionary
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
69
upheavals of the peoples all over the Continent seeking political freedom and national
identity’’ (Trueblood 1981: 200-1). Whether that effect seems, from our perspective,
to have been benign or otherwise, is a question for debate (Tessier 1997: 6). We
cannot hold Byron responsible for the frightening subsequent history of Continental
chauvinism.
There were even some readers – very important readers, as I hope I shall show –
who regarded Byron above all as a master of satire and of comic inventiveness: the
biggest anti-Romantic of them all. Different nations and different writers combined
these factors in whatever proportions suited them best, or in whatever proportions the
regimes under which they lived were prepared to countenance. But no matter how
repressive the regimes, the myth was all-powerful – Byron as both writer and thinker,
doer and actor, was (except to his own class, in his own country) a universal
revolutionary idol and role-model, whose status no one (except, again, his own
compatriots) could diminish.
He was preoccupied with the figures of Faust and of Don Juan – he wrote the most
radical rewritings of the myths in their entire history. In this he was set apart from all
his English ‘‘Romantic’’ contemporaries, but followed and answered by many Continental writers (though few of them appreciated his originality). Just as his Don Juan
renders impossible an idealization of womanhood – for Byron, women are the
predators – so Manfred, his Faust, renders impossible any thought that nonhuman
powers are to blame for the hero’s, and mankind’s, fate.
There was justice in what happened. Of all English writers in the Napoleonic and
post-Napoleonic period, Byron owed most both to his immediate and to his more
distant European predecessors. He is the most European of the English so-called
‘‘Romantic’’ writers. It was thus natural that he should be assimilated as an influence
in return. The depth and breadth of his influence is, however, startling. In 1909
Arthur Symons wrote, ‘‘[Byron] filled Europe, as no other poet in the history of
Literature has filled Europe’’ (Symons 1909: 249). What I shall try to examine in this
chapter is not only direct influence, but the way in which Byron created a literary and
political climate in which like-minded writers could be more confidently true to
themselves.
Russia: Pushkin and Lermontov
A sadder way of putting it is this: early nineteenth-century European literature is
strewn with the corpses of men who thought that they’d been influenced by Byron. In
many cases, they really had been influenced by him. For example: in the eighth
chapter of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (published 1833), Tatyana, the heroine, who has
earlier in the poem flung herself at the protagonist, only to be rebuffed, sees him once
more across the room at a St Petersburg reception:
70
Peter Cochran
Tq yhfdbncz gjhzljr cnhjqysq
Jkbufh[bxtcrb[ ,tctl^
B [jkjl ujhljcnb cgjrjqbjq^
B pnf cvtcm xbyjd b ktn&
Yj pnj rnj d njkgt bp,hfyyjq
Cnjbn ,tpvjkdysq b nevfyysq$
Lkz dct[ jy rf;tncz xe;bv&
Vtkmrf.n kbwf gthtl ybv^
Rfr hzl ljrexys[ ghbdbltybq&
Xnj^ cgkby bkm cnhf;leofz cgtcm
D tuj kbwt$ Pfxtv jy pltcm$
Rnj jy nfrjd$ E;tkm Tdutyyq$
E;tkb jy$ && Nfr^ njxyj jy&
-- - Lfdyj kb r yfv jy pfytc/y$
Dc/ njn ;t km jy bkm ecvbhbkcz$
Bkm rjhxbn nfr ;t xelfrf$
Crf;bnt^ xtv jy djpdhfnbkcz$
Xnj yfv ghtlcnhfdbn jy gjrf$
Xtv ysyt zdbncz$ Vtkmvjnjv^
Rjcvjgjkbnjv^ gfnhbjnjv^
Ufhjkmljv^ rdfrthjv^ [fy;jq^
Bkm vfcrjq otujkmy/n byjq^
Bkm ghjcnj ,eltn lj,hsq vfksq^
Rfr ds lf z^ rfr wtksq cdtn$
Yj rhfqytq vtht^ vjq cjdtn%
Jncnfnm jn vjls j,dtnifkjq&
Ljdjkmyj jy vjhjxbk cdtn . . . (Onegin VIII vii-viii)
(She likes the stately disposition
Of oligarchic colloquies,
Their chilly pride in high position,
The mix of years and ranks she sees.
But who is that among the chosen,
That figure standing mute and frozen,
That stranger no one seems to know?
Before him faces come and go
Like spectres in a bleak procession.
What is it—martyred pride or spleen
That marks his face? . . . Is that Eugene?
That figure with the strange expression?
Can that be he? It is, I say.
‘‘But when did fate cast him our way?
‘‘Is he the same, or is he learning?
Or does he play the outcast still?
In what new guise is he returning?
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
71
What role does he intend to fill?
Childe Harold? Melmoth for a while?
Cosmopolite? A Slavophile?
A Quaker? Bigot?—might one ask?
Or will he sport some other mask?
Or maybe he’s just dedicated,
Like you or me, to being nice?
In any case, here’s my advice:
Give up a role when it’s outdated.
He’s gulled the world . . . now let it go.’’
‘‘You knew him them?’’ ‘‘Well, yes and no.’’ (Pushkin 1995: 188)
The matter of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales is here being held at a satirical
distance, but aided by a style derived from Don Juan. Onegin really has modeled
himself on the futile Byronic hero, just as Pushkin’s earlier works A Prisoner in the
Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisari (Rfdrfprbq Gktyybr and
<f[xbcfhfqcrbq Ajynfy, 1822 and 1824) had modeled themselves on the
poems in which he first appeared. However, just as Tatyana steels herself against
the attraction she still feels for him by adopting a pose of amused dispassion, so
Pushkin could only contextualize one heavy Byronic style by adopting another, light
one. Pushkin’s most overt act of homage to Byron is the neglected Little House at
Kolomna (Ljvbr d Rjkjvyt), a comic hymn to the female sexual impulse in ottava
rima, modeled on Beppo.
After years struggling against Tsarist oppressiveness in all its forms, Pushkin died
in a wretched duel which he provoked himself.
Byron was regarded with deep suspicion by the Tsarist authorities. All translations
of his work were censored; John Murray’s guidebooks warned against trying to
smuggle your copy of Don Juan through the Russian customs (Custine 1991: 252
n.16).
Pushkin’s successor was also killed in a duel, and was less critically in Byron’s
shadow than Pushkin had been. Mikhail Lermontov became emotional when he
thought of Byron:
Z vjkjl* yj rbgzn yf cthlwt pderb^
B <fqhjyf ljcnbuyenm z , [jntk*
E yfc jlyf leif^ jlyb b nt ;t verb*
J tckb , jlbyfrjd ,sk eltk!
Rfr jy^ bie pf,dtymz b cdj,jls^
Rfr jy^ ht,zxtcndt gskfk e; z leijq^
K.,bk pfrfn d ujhf[^ gtyzobtcz djls^
B ,dhm ptvys[ b ,ehm yt,tcys[ djq. (Lermontov 1961: 136)
(Though young, sounds boil within me, / And it is Byron I wish to emulate: For we
inherit one soul and like torments, / Oh could but our fate also be the same. // Like him,
72
Peter Cochran
I seek oblivion and freedom, / Like his, my soul in childhood was aflame, / I loved a
mountain sunset, foaming waters, / And heaven and earth aloud with tempest’s roar.
(trans. Tatyana Wolff.)
Pechorin, the protagonist of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840), has small,
delicate hands, curly hair, and a pale, noble brow; at 25 he is bored with society,
learning, warfare, and women; he enjoys dressing as a stylish Asiatic tribesman,
adores the novels of Scott, and prefers to doubt everything. He also has a destructive influence on the lives of nearly everyone he meets. It comes as no surprise
when he describes himself as one of those who start life expecting to end up as
Alexander the Great, or Lord Byron (Lermontov 1966: 53-4, 67-8, 113, 135, 158,
184).
Germany: Heine and Goethe
Heinrich Heine celebrated Byron’s death in an aptly sombre manner:
Eine starke, schwarze Barke
Segelt trauervoll dahin.
Die vermummten und verstummten
Leichenhüter sitzen drin.
Toter Dichter, stille liegt er,
Mit entblöatem Angesicht;
Seine blauen Augen schauen
Immer noch zum Himmelslicht.
Aus der Tiefe klingts, als riefe
Eine kranke Nixenbraut,
Und die Wellen, sie zerschellen
An dem Kahn, wie Klagelaut.
(A stout, black bark sails sadly along. In it sit the masked and silent pall-watchers. / The
dead poet lies still, his face unshrouded; his blue eyes still gaze up at the light of heaven.
/ Sounds rise from the deep, as if a water-sprite’s ailing bride were calling, and the waves
break against the bark, like lamentations.) (Heine 1968: 118)
When he heard of Byron’s death, Heine referred to him as having been ‘‘mein Vetter’’
(my cousin; Heine 1970: 163). But it was not the Haroldian Byron that Heine – who,
unlike Pushkin, knew English – admired most. A few stanzas from Deutschland. Ein
Wintermärchen (1844) will show the affinity with the later, facetious Byron. In the
poem, Heine, returning from France, sees German soil for the first time in years, and
is entranced by the singing of a little German girl:
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
73
Ein Hochzeitkarmen ist mein Lied,
Das bessere, das neue!
In meiner Seele gehen auf
Die Sterne der höchsten Weihe –
Begeisterte Sterne, sie lodern wild,
Zerfließen in Flammenbächen –
Ich fühle mich wunderbar erstarkt,
Ich könnte Eichen zerbrechen!
Seit ich auf deutsche Erde trat,
Durchströmen mich Zaubersäfte –
Der Riese hat wieder die Mutter berührt,
Und es wuchsen ihm neu die Kräfte.
II
Während die Kleine von Himmelslust
Getrillert und musizieret,
Ward von den preußichen Douaniers
Mein Koffer visitieret.
Beschnüffelten alles, kramten herum
In Hemden, Hosen, Schnupftüchern;
Sie suchten nach Spitzen, nach Bijouterien,
Auch nach verbotenen Büchern.
Ihr Toren, die ihr im Koffer sucht!
Hier werdet ihr nichts entdecken!
Die Contrebande, die mit mir reist,
Die hab ich im Kopfe stecken. (Heine 1991, I: 65-76, II: 1-12)
(My song is an epithalamion, my new song, my better song! I feel stars of the highest
grace rising in my soul. / They burn with a savage fire, and their rays turn into torrents
of flame! I feel my powers growing in a marvelous way; I feel wonderfully strengthened,
as though I could burst oak trees asunder! / Since I set foot in Germany, magic powers
are streaming through me; the Giant has touched the Mother, and has gained new skills.
/ II. / While the little girl trilled and made her heavenly music, the Prussian customs
officers looked through my luggage. / They nosed through the lot, shirts, coats, snotrags; looking for lace, for jewels – also for forbidden books. / You morons, searching my
trunk! You won’t find anything there – the contrebande I bring with me is hidden in my
head.)2
The stanzas show a movement from a mock early-Byronic exaltation, via a laterByronic dip into bathos with the description of the minutiae inspected by the
customs officer, to another later-Byronic defiance, a pride in the poet’s ability to see
further than the provincial boors who would muzzle him. Heine’s imitation of the
Englishman’s satire is more flattering than the condescension of Goethe, who, in Faust
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Part II, portrays Byron as Euphorion, talented offspring of his protagonist and Helen
of Troy, a child who takes off, flies too near the sun, and disappears in ‘‘ein
Lichtschweif’’ (Faust II, iii) – a streak of light. Goethe, acknowledged as a genius
well before Byron, died in a comfortable old age: Heine died slowly of spinal
tuberculosis, exiled from home (though, like Byron, he never had one) in his Parisian
‘‘mattress-grave.’’
Italy
An Italian poem which shows how a writer from that country could transform the
verifiable Byron into a more accommodating one is Francesco dall’Òngaro’s 1837 Il
Venerdı̀ Santo (Good Friday). Dall’Òngaro started adult life as a priest, but quit the
cloth to follow the Risorgimento. In his poem Byron (‘‘Giorgio’’) sits one evening in
the Euganaean Hills with Allegra (‘‘sua figlia d’amore’’). In his inscrutability, he
resembles one of his own earlier heroes:
. . . sotto le brune
Ciglia sinistro scintillò lo sguardo,
Nel suo mantello si ravvolse e indarno
Il suo vicino sel cercò da presso. (Dall’Òngaro 1837: 19)
( . . . under the dark brow his sinister gaze flashed, he gathered himself in his mantel and
vainly did [even] his nearest neighbor look for him.)
Allegra sings an Ave Maria, in strange echo of his own in Don Juan IV:
Ave, Maria: questa è l’ora tranquilla
Che il tuo nome gentil mi parla al cor;
Or ti saluta colla sacra squilla
L’aura del vespro accarezzando i fior . . . (Dall’Òngaro 1837:24)
(Hail, Mary: this is the calm hour when your sweet name speaks to my heart; now the
evening breeze greets you with its sacred tune . . . )
But for dall’Òngaro, as for most Italian poets, there is no light relief, no critical
comment. Father and daughter hear the sound of Good Friday worship in the
distance, as if from Cavalleria Rusticana, or, with greater relevance, from Faust Part
I scene vi, except that dall’Òngaro invests his Easter scene with far greater Christian
meaning than does Goethe. Witnessing the annual procession, ‘‘Giorgio’’ is transported. After explaining what Good Friday means, he tells Allegra that he will take
her back to England, where
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
75
Ada ed Allegra entrambe
Innocenti del pari ed infelici
Di me vi sovverete ed io di voi
Sia che in terra io travagli, o in ciel riposi . . . (Dall’Òngaro 1837: 51).
(Ada and Allegra, neither knowing any unhappiness, you will remember me, and I you,
whether I work on earth or sleep in heaven . . . )
. . . if she will only be patient; for he has first to go to Greece:
Non lungi
Dall’Italia è una terra, inclita un tempo
Per armi e per virtù, per quanto al mondo
Può far altero e venerato un suolo.
Testè per lunga servitù prostrata
Dell’antiche sue glorie e de’ suoi fati
Immemore la vidi, e maledissi.
Or, dal sonno riscossa, i suoi tiranni,
Disfida a sanguinosa ultima guerra.
Stringe coll’una man la croce bianca,
Coll’altra il ferro onde il divin vessillo
Sugli aerei pinacoli riponga
Dove d’Ali la curva luna splende.
Tu resterai pregando, io là del sacro
Adorabile segno i dritti augusti
Vendicherò . . . (Dall’Òngaro 1837: 52-3).
(Not far from Italy there is a land, once glorious for arms and virtue, respected
throughout the world. I witnessed her long-worn-out servitude, and, unmindful of
her ancient glories and of its destiny, I saw her and cursed her. Now, having recovered
from sleep, and from her tyrants, she is waging one last bloody war. With one hand she
holds the white cross, with the other the divine standard, placed on the lofty battlements from which flies the crescent moon of Ali. You will remain here praying, I shall
be victorious in the sacred sign of the mighty laws.)
Dall’Òngaro’s scenario is not so very ludicrous. He has read not only his Moore, but
his Medwin and his Blessington, and has amassed from them sufficient evidence of
Byron’s admiration for Catholicism to give his vision credibility (‘‘Quel loro purgatorio è una cara dottrina’’ – compare Medwin 1966: 80.) Our view of ‘‘Giorgio’’’s
aspirations is colored by the knowledge of what happened to father and daughter in
reality.
Italy’s most important poet of the period – Giacomo Leopardi – does not seem to
have held Byron in any esteem, or even to have read him much; but Byron (much of
whose work was banned in early nineteenth-century Italy) was a potent literary and
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moral force during the Risorgimento. Here is an extract from the diary of Cesare Abba
(published 1882), one of Garibaldi’s Thousand: ‘‘Trovammo un cavallo disteso morto
sul margine del sentiero, e si disse che era di Bixio: il quale irato, perchè ci nitriti
poteva scoprirci al nemico, gli aveva scaricata nel canio la sua pistola. Byron, sempre
Byron! Lara l’avrebbe fatto anche lui’’ (Abba 1918: 79). (We found a horse lying dead
by the side of the path and they said it was Bixio’s, who had been enraged because its
neighing could have revealed our presence to the enemy and had blown its brains out
with his own pistol. Byron, always Byron! Lara would have done the same; Abba
1962: 53.)
Spain: Espronceda
The ‘‘Spanish Byron’’ was José de Espronceda, who died of diphtheria and syphilis in
1842. His most Byronic poems are the unfinished El Diablo mundo, which, like Don
Juan, denies life any universal meaning or harmony; and El estudiante de Salamanca, his
version of the Don Juan legend, published in 1840. In its second part the heroine,
Elvira, pens a letter (in ottava rima) to the depraved protagonist Don Felix de
Montemar, who has seduced and betrayed her:
A Dios por siempre, a Dios: un breve instante
siento de vida, y en mi pecho el fuego
aún arde de me amor; mi vista errante
vaga desvanecida . . . , calma luego
¡oh muerte! Mi inquietud . . . ¡Sola . . . expirante . . . !
Ámame; no, perdona: ¡inútil ruego!
A Dios, a Dios, ¡tu corazón perdı́!
¡Todo acabó en el mund para mı́!
(For ever fare thee well; I have I know
One moment brief of life, and still love’s fire
Glows in my heart; mine eyes they wander slow,
My sight grows dim . . . So soothe now, vision dire,
My fretful soul! . . . Alone . . . To death I go!
Oh love me! . . . No, forgive! . . . Oh vain desire!
Goodbye, I could not hold thy heart in fee!
. . . So all is ended in the world for me!) (Espronceda 1991: 64-5)
It is like, and yet unlike, Donna Julia’s letter to Juan at the end of the first canto of
Byron’s epic, which Espronceda knew in the original; he had, with many liberals, been
exiled in England by the government of Ferdinand VII ‘‘of grateful memory’’ (Byron
1980-93, V: 83). Unlike Julia, Elvira dies, and the poem’s terrifying second half
shows Don Felix descending like Manfred into the shades, led by her ghost – where
Manfred has only the shortest of meetings with Astarte, however, Don Felix is
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
77
punished by being forced to make love to Elivira’s sentient corpse for the rest of
eternity. It is a debt to Byron, being paid with creative inversions and variations.
Byron’s problem was whether to punish Don Juan by damning him or marrying him
off – Espronceda does both at the same time.
Once Espronceda passed away, Spanish Byronism ceased.
France: Stendhal and Musset
Of the numerous French writers who borrowed from Byron, Stendhal and Musset
stand out. Consider this, from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1830):
Julien la serra dans ses bras avec la plus vive passion; jamais elle ne lui avait semblé si
belle. Même à Paris, se disait-il confusément, je ne pourrai rencontrer un plus grand
caractère. Elle avait toute la gaucherie d’une femme peu accoutumé à ces sortes de soins,
et en même temps le vrai courage d’un être qui ne craint que des dangers d’un autre
ordre et bien autrement terribles.
Pendant que Julien soupait de grand appétit, et que son amie le plaisantait sur la
simplicité de ce repas, car elle avait horreur de parler sérieusement, la porte de la
chambre fut tout à coup secouée avec force. C’était M. de Rênal.
—Pourquoi t’es-tu enfermée? lui criait-il.
Julien n’eut que le temps de se glisser sous le canapé.
— Quoi! Vous êtes tout habillée, dit M. de Rênal en entrant; vous soupez, et vous
avez fermé votre porte à clef.
Les jours ordinaires, cette question, faite avec toute la sécheresse conjugale, eût
troublé Mme de Rênal, mais elle sentait que son mari n’avait qu’à se baisser un peu
pour apercevoir Julien; car M. de Rênal s’était jeté sur la chaise que Julien occupait un
moment auparavant vis-à-vis le canapé.
La migraine servit d’excuse à tout. Pendant qu’à son tour son mari lui contait
longuement les incidents de la poule qu’il avait gagnée au billard du Casino, une
poule de dix-neuf francs ma foi! ajoutait-il, elle aperçut sur une chaise, à trois pas devant
eux, le chapeau de Julien. Son sang-froid redoubla, elle se mit à se déshabiller, et, dans
un certain moment, passant rapidement derrière son mari, jeta une robe sur la chaise au
chapeau. (Stendhal 1964: 257-8)
(Julien clasped her eagerly, passionately in his arms; never before had she seemed so
beautiful as now. Even in Paris, his bemused mind was thinking, I can’t possibly meet
anyone with a nobler nature. She showed all the awkward embarrassment of a woman
little used to attentions of this kind, but she showed at the same time the true courage
belonging to one who is only frightened by dangers of another, and very much more
terrible order.
While Julien was eating his supper with a keen appetite and his mistress was joking
with him about the frugality of his meal, the door of the room was all at once violently
shaken. It was M. de Rênal.
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‘‘Why have you locked yourself in?’’ he called out to her loudly. Julien had only time
just to slip under the sofa.
‘‘What? you’re completely dressed,’’ said M. de Rênal as he entered, ‘‘you’re having
supper and you’ve locked the door!’’
On any ordinary day, such a question, addressed to her with all his usual conjugal
curtness, would have made Mme de Rênal feel upset, but now she was conscious that her
husband had only to stoop down a little to catch sight of Julien. M. de Rênal had flung
himself into the chair on which Julien had been sitting a moment before and which was
directly facing the sofa.
Her headache served as an excuse for everything. While M. de Rênal was giving her
in his turn a long and detailed account of how he had won the pool at billiards in the
Casino – ‘‘A pool of nineteen francs, by Jove,’’ he added, – she noticed Julien’s hat on a
chair three feet away. With formidable presence of mind, she began to undress and at a
given moment, passing rapidly behind her husband, she flung a dress over the chair
with the hat on it.) (Stendhal 1965: 237-8)
From the proximity of cuckold and cuckold-maker, to the tell-tale item of clothing,
and the wickedness of the observation that, the nearer discovery comes, the more cool
and mendacious the adulteress gets, the comedy is pure Byron – from Don Juan canto
I, again. Madame de Rênal is not as loquacious in her lying as Julia is; she doesn’t have
to lie, for Monsieur de Rênal accuses her of nothing; but we’re confident that, if put
on the spot, she could. Stendhal is playing witty games with Don Juan, as his
epigraphs hint. The difference between Julien and Juan is that where Juan reads
Boscan and Garcilasso, Julien fortifies himself with the Mémoire de Ste Hélène and the
bulletins of the Grande Armée, and at first loves Napoleon far more than he does
Madame de Rênal.
Stendhal, alone amongst writers mentioned in this essay, met Byron – at Milan in
1816. He was witness to the scene of Dr Polidori’s arrest at La Scala, when the doctor
unwisely asked an Austrian soldier to remove his hat. Stendhal’s English was excellent.
French Byronism began with Alfonse de Lamartine’s ‘‘L’Homme,’’ in Méditations
poétiques (1820):
Toi, dont le monde encore ignore le vrai nom,
Esprit mystérieux, mortel, ange ou démon,
Qui que tu sois, Byron, bon ou fatal génie,
J’aime de tes concerts la sauvage harmonie
Comme j’aime le bruit de la foudre et des vents
Se mêlant dans l’orage à la voix des torrents! (Lamartine 1956: 5)
(You, whom the world is still unable to name, mysterious spirit, mortal, angel or
demon, whoever you are, Byron, good or bad spirit, I love the savage harmony of your
music, as I love the way the thunderbolt and winds mix during the storm, together with
the noise of the torrents! . . . )
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The paradox in France was that Romanticism was reactionary: Classicism was the
style of the radicals. Lamartine was a radical (of sorts); but he did not admire the later
satirical work of Byron, which he characterized as ‘‘l’école du rire.’’
The hero of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Don José, is much more Byronic – more
grim, brooding, and guilt-ridden – than his operatic version. Mérimée and Stendhal
introduced Alfred de Musset to Don Juan, and the effect was deeper and longer-lasting
than that of any others I have to chronicle. In Namouna (1829) Musset wrote:
Eh! Depuis quand un livre est-il donc autre chose
Que le rêve d’un jour qu’on raconte un instant;
Un oiseau qui gazouille et s’envole; – une rose
Qu’on respire et qu’on jette, et qui meurt en tombant; –
Un ami qu’on aborde, avec lequel on cause,
Moitié lui répondant, et moitié l’écoutant?
Aujourd’hui, par exemple, il plaı̂t à ma cervelle
De rimer en sixains le conte que voici.
Va-t-on le maltraiter et lui chercher querelle?
Est-ce sa faute, à lui, si je l’écris ainsi?
Byron, me direz-vous, m’a servi de modèle.
Vous ne savez donc pas qu’il imitait Pulci?
Lisez les Italiens, vous verrez s’ils les vole.
Rien n’appartient à rien, tout appartient à tous.
Il faut être ignorant comme un maı̂tre d’école
Pour se flatter de dire une seule parole
Que personne ici-bas n’ait pu dire avant vous.
C’est imiter quelqu’un que de planter des choux. (Musset 1998: 330-1)
(Eh! Since when has a book been anything other than a day-dream which one relates in
an instant? A bird which warbles, and then flies off? A rose which one smells and then
throws away, and which is dead before it hits the ground? A friend one bumps into, to
whom one chats, half listening to him, half replying to him? / Today, for example, I
took it into my head to write the tale before you in sestets. Are you really going to abuse
it by searching for its sources? Is it really its fault, that I write it in the way I do? You
will tell me that Byron has served me for a model. Don’t you know that he imitated
Pulci? / Read the Italians – you’ll see they stole. Nothing belongs to nothing,
everything belongs to everything. You’d have to be as ignorant as a schoolteacher to
flatter yourself that you’d said a single word that hadn’t been said before. Even to plant
cabbages is to imitate someone.)
The arrogance, the conversational tone – quite unlike the chaste, rhetorical alexandrines of Lamartine, who idolized Byron without in the least imitating him – the
reader-insulting insouciance: the implication that poetry isn’t a serious business: all
belie the seeming disclaimer of Byronic influence – specifically, the influence of Beppo
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and of Don Juan – which Musset, after all, doesn’t actually deny, even though
Namouna is not in ottava rima.
Poland: Mickiewicz
In Poland, the more nationhood was threatened, the more important Byron became;
and by the mid-1830s, Polish nationhood was officially no more, obliterated by
Russia. The fact drove a wedge between Pushkin and his friend, Adam Mickiewicz.
Mickiewicz once committed himself to writing, ‘‘It is only Byron that I read, and I
throw away any book written in another spirit, because I detest lies’’ (Robinson 1938:
131 n.143). Despite such confidence, there were serious differences of belief between
the two poets; the Catholic Mickiewicz could not come to terms with the nihilistic
Byron. Mickiewicz made a version of The Giaour, which turns all that poem’s antiChristian sneers into statements of immaculate faith. But on less controversial
Oriental ground he could create pictures of emptiness, gloom, and decay equal to
anything of his idol’s. Here is one of his Crimean Sonnets, Bakczysaraj (Bakhchisarai,
1826). It refers to the ruined harem of Khan Girey, which Pushkin had himself
mourned at the end of his early poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (compare also
Byron, The Giaour, 287-351):
Jeszcze wielka, już pusta Girajów dziedzina!
Zmiatane czołem baszów ganki i przedsienia,
Sofy, trony potȩgi, miłości schronienia
Przeskakuje szrañcza, obwija gadzina.
Skróś okien różnofarbnych powoju roślina,
Wdzieraja̧c siȩ na głuche ściany i sklepienia,
Zajmuje dzieło ludzi w imiȩ przyrodzenia
I pisze Balsazara głoskami ‘‘RUINA’’.
W środku sali wyciȩte z marmuru naczynie;
To fontanna haremu, dota̧d stoi cało
I perłowe łzy sa̧cza̧c woła przez pustynie:
‘‘Gdzież jesteś, o miłości, potȩgo i chwało?
Wy macie trwać na wieki, zródło szybko płynie,
O hañbo! wyście przeszły, a żródło zostało’’ (Mickiewicz [1826] 2005)
(Those halls of the Gireys – still vast and great! –
Are galleries where desolation falls;
Those varicolored domes, those crumbling halls
Where proud pashas upon rich divans sate:
Retreats of love and palaces of state –
Here now the locust leaps, the serpent crawls,
And bindweed Ruin writes, as on the walls
The hand of doom once traced Belshazzar’s fate.
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81
Within, the marble fountain made to hold
The harem waters still unbroken stands,
Which shedding pearly fears, ’neath shattered panes,
Cries: ‘‘Where are ye, O Glory, Love, and Gold?
You should endure, while streams waste into sands.
O shame, ye pass – the gazelle’s spring remains!’’) (translation from <http://daisy.
htmlplanet.com/amick.htm>)
Mickiewicz’s most-read poem, Pan Tadeusz (it is Poland’s national epic) was published
in Paris in 1834 – the same year as his Giaour translation. It shows the influence, not
of the Turkish Tales, as in Bakczysaraj, but of Don Juan and of Eugene Onegin, in its
detailed depiction of rural Lithuanian society (Poland and Lithuania were one country
between 1386 and 1772) and the social, hunting, wooing, dressing, wedding, and
gastronomic rituals practiced there a generation previously. Its authorial voice sometimes intrudes, but, unlike Byron’s, bestows an Olympian calm on the narrative. Like
Onegin, it is a novel in verse; like Don Juan, it takes recent history as its subject, and
has as hero a Walter Scott-type innocent caught up in political and amatory escapades,
the significance of which he cannot judge – which may be a good thing, as the action
predates and anticipates Russia’s attempted destruction of Polish nationalism in the
1830s.
Like Byron in the English cantos of Don Juan, Mickiewicz’s nostalgia for a society
which is no more is tempered by his satirical awareness of that society’s failings. His
landowners are as litigious and quarrelsome as they are patriotic: they argue over the
merits of hunting dogs, pillage one another’s estates, condescend to the poor, and
challenge one another to duels, almost as happily as they massacre Muscovites, or join
with Napoleon against the Tsar. The venerable old man who shows most knowledge
of ancient Lithuanian social customs in Book XII has already been established as the
tale’s most deadly knife-thrower in Book V.
Although Pan Tadeusz is far less enthralling erotically than Don Juan, the scene
in Book V in which the hero sees the older of the two heroines, Telimena, writhing
about in what seems romantic despair, only to find on advancing that she is
being attacked by ants, has nothing to fear from a comparison with anything in
Don Juan:
Widać z jej ruchów, w jakiej strasznej jest mȩczarni;
Chwyta siȩ za pierś, szyjȩ, za stopy, kolana;
Skoczył Tadeusz myśla̧c, że jest pomieszana
Lub ma wielka̧ chorobȩ. Lecz z innej przyczyny
Pochodziły te ruchy.
U bliskiej brzeziny
Było wielkie mrowisko, owad gospodarny
Snuł siȩ wkoło po trawie, ruchawy i czarny;
Nie wiedzieć, czy z potrzeby, czy z upodobania
Lubił szczególnie zwiedzać Świa̧tyniȩ dumania;
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Od stołecznego wzgórka aż po zródła brzegi
Wydeptał drogȩ, która̧ wiodł swoje szeregi.
Nieszczȩściem, Telimena siedziała śród dróżki;
Mrówki, znȩcone blaskiem bieluchnej poñczoszki,
Wbiegły, gȩsto zaczȩły łaskotać i ka̧sać,
Telimena musiała uciekać, otrza̧sać,
Na koniec na murawie sia̧ść i owad łowić.
Nie mógł jej swej pomocy Tadeusz odmówić;
Oczyszczaja̧c sukienkȩ, aż do nóg siȩ zniżył,
Usta trafem ku skroniom Telimeny zbliżył W tak przyjaznej postawie, choć nic nie mówili
O rannych kłótniach swoich, przecież siȩ zgodzili;
I nie wiedzieć jak długo trwałaby rozmowa,
Gdyby ich nie przebudził dzwonek z Soplicowa –
(Her motions showed her fearful agonies;
She clasped her neck, her feet, her hair, her breast.
Tadeusz leapt forth thinking her possessed
Or in some sickness. But that was not why
She rushed about.
Beneath a birch nearby,
There lay a mighty ant-hill whence a mass
Of nimble creatures swarmed across the grass.
Impelled by need perhaps or delectation,
They specially loved the Shrine of Meditation,
And from their hill-town to the fountain’s banks
Had trodden a path by which they led their ranks.
Unhappily Telimena sat across
This path. The ants attracted by the gloss
Began to invade her stockings shining white
And swarm up them to tickle and to bite.
Telimena tried by running to detach them,
But had to sit down on the grass and catch them.
Tadeusz seeing her in this distress
Could not refuse to aid her helplessness.
He brushed her gown, bent to her feet, and now
By chance his lips came nearer to her brow
In such a tender posture that though not
A word was said, their quarrel was forgot.
Their converse might have gone on – who can tell? –
Had they not heard the Soplicowo bell –) (Mickiewicz 1998: 222-5)
However, Telimena’s aim is to seduce Tadeusz away, as Calypso seduces Odysseus, or
Alcina seduces Ruggiero, from his virtuous homeland to the depravities of St Petersburg, so the poem cannot allow their relationship to flourish: in any case, Tadeusz’s
Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
83
father wants his son married to the poem’s younger heroine, Zosia, so that their
families may be reconciled. At one point in Book VIII Telimena appears to Tadeusz
ghost-like, just as the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke does to Juan in Canto XVI. She bears the
same emotional relationship to Zosia as Fitz-Fulke or Adeline Amundeville might
have borne to Aurora Raby, had Don Juan been continued.
Mickiewicz died of cholera in Constantinople, trying to raise a brigade to fight the
Russians.
Conclusion
Perhaps it would be good to end by reminding ourselves what the early nineteenthcentury English establishment thought of Byron. My last quotation is by the Rev.
John Todd, first Professor of English at University College London, from his 1830
book The Students’ Guide:
Byron . . . is doomed to be exiled from the libraries of all virtuous men. It is a blessing to
the world that what is putrid must soon pass away. The carcase hung up in chains will
be gazed at for a short time in horror; but men will soon turn their eyes away, and
remove even the gallows on which it is hung.3
Notes
1 Œuvres de Lord Byron, 10 vols. Paris 1819-21,
trans. ‘‘A.-E. de Chastopalli’’ (Amédée Pichot
and Eusèbe de Salle); 10 vols. Paris 1821-2; 5
vols. Paris 1820-2; 15 vols. Paris 1821-4; 8
vols. Paris 1822-5, including a notice préliminaire by Charles Nodier; Œuvres nouvelles, 10
vols. Paris 1824; 13 vols. Paris 1823-4; 20 vols.
Paris 1827-31 (6th edition: includes translation of Medwin’s Conversations); 6 vols. Paris
1830, 1830-5, 1836; 1 vol. Paris 1837; Paris
1842 (11th edition); 1872 (‘‘15th edition’’).
2 All translations are by Peter Cochran unless
otherwise stated.
3 Quoted in Chambers (1925: 19). Todd, writing as ‘‘Oxoniensis’’, had in 1822 published a
pamphlet against Byron’s Cain: ‘‘A Remonstrance Addressed to Mr. John Murray,
Respecting a Recent Publication.’’
References and Further Reading
Abba, Giuseppe Cesare (1918). Da Quarto al Volturn/ Noterelle d’uno dei Mille, ed. Nicola Zanichelli, 12th edn. Bologna.
Abba, Giuseppe Cesare (1962). Abba, The Diary of
One of Garibaldi’s Thousand, trans. E. R. Vincent.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, E. M. (1956). Byron and Goethe: Analysis of
a Passion. London: Bowes and Bowes.
Byron, Lord (1980-93). The Complete Poetical
Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cardwell, Richard A. (ed.) (1988). Byron and Europe.
Special issue, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 32.
Cardwell, Richard A. (ed.) (1997). Lord Byron the
European: Essays from the International Byron Society. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
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Cardwell, Richard A. (ed.) (2005). The Reception of
Byron in Europe, 2 vols. London: Thoemmes
Continuum.
Chambers, R. W. (1925). Ruskin (and Others) on
Byron. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Custine, Marquis de (1991). Letters from Russia,
trans. and ed. Robin Buss. London: Penguin.
Dall’Òngaro, Francesco (1837). ‘‘Il Venerdı̀ Santo,
Scena della vita di L. Byron.’’ Canto di Francesco
dall’Ongaro. Padova: Cartalier.
Espronceda, José de (1991). The Student of Salamanca, trans. C. K. Davies, intro. Richard Cardwell. Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips.
Estève, Edmond (1907). Byron et le Romantisme
français. Essai sur la fortune et l’influence de
l’œuvre de Byron en France de 1812 à 1850.
Paris: Hachette.
Gassenmeier, Michael, Kamolz, Katrin, Gurr,
Jens, and Pointner, Frank-Erik (eds.) (1996).
The Literary Reception of British Romanticism on
the European Continent. Essen: Die Blaue Eule.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1965). Goethes
Briefe, ed. Bodo Morawe. Hamburg: Christian
Wegner Verlag.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1970). Ueber Kunst
und Alterthum, 6 vols. Bern: Herbert Lang.
Greenleaf, Monika (1994). ‘‘Pushkin’s Byronic Apprenticeship: A Problem in Cultural Syncretism.’’ Russian Review, 53 (3): 382-39.
Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico (1969). Pagine
autobiografiche, ed. Gaetano Ragonese.
Heine, Heinrich (1968). Heinrich Heine, Selected
Verse, ed. and trans. Peter Branscombe. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Heine, Heinrich (1970). Werke/Briefe, vol. 20, ed.
F. H. Eisner.
Heine, Heinrich (1991). Deutschland ein Wintermärchen, ed. Werner Bellman. Leipzig: Reclam.
Hoffmeister, Gerhard (1983). Byron und der europäische Byronismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Lamartine, Alphone de ([1820] 1956). ‘‘L’Homme
– à Lord Byron.’’ In Méditations poétiques. Paris:
Garnier.
Lermontov, Mikhail (1961). ‘‘***.’’ In
I. Leningrad: Nauk.
Lermontov, Mikhail (1966). A Hero of Our Time,
trans. Paul Foote. London: Penguin.
Medwin, Thomas (1966). Conversations of Lord
Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Mickiewicz, Adam ([1826] 2005). Bakczysaraj.
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amwiersz/0037.htm>.
Mickiewicz, Adam (1956). Adam Mickiewicz
1798-1855. Selected Poems, ed. Clark Mills.
New York: Voyages Press.
Mickiewicz, Adam (1998). Pan Tadeusz, trans.
Kenneth R. Mackenzie. New York: Hippocrene
Books.
Musset, Alfred de (1998). Namouna. In Premières
poésies, ed. Jacques Bony. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
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Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pushkin, Alexander (1975). Eugene Onegin, trans.
Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Pushkin, Alexander (1995). Eugene Onegin, trans.
James E. Falen. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Pushkin, Alexander (1986). Pushkin on Literature,
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Stanford University Press.
Robertson, J. G. (ed.) (1925). Goethe and Byron.
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Robinson, Charles E. (ed.) (1982). Lord Byron and
Some of His Contemporaries: Essays from the Sixth
International Byron Seminar. Newark: University
of Delaware Press
Robinson, H. C. (1938). Henry Crabb Robinson on
Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3
vols. London: Dent.
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Deux Mondes, December 1: 593-645.
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Byron’s Influence on European Romanticism
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English Poetry. New York: Dutton.
Tessier, Thérèse (1997). ‘‘Byron and France:
A Survey of the Impact of the Poet’s Personality
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Byron the European: Essays from the International
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Byron Society. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
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Trueblood, Paul Graham (ed.) (1981). Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, A Symposium. London: Macmillan.
5
The Infinite Imagination: Early
Romanticism in Germany
Susan Bernofsky
German Romanticism was anything but a unified movement. What we think of today
as ‘‘Romanticism’’ is a more or less arbitrary assemblage of chronologically overlapping groups of writers distributed across several German cities, as well as a handful
whose association with these others may have consisted of little more than a partially
shared sensibility. Of the various Romanticisms that flourished in Germany around
the turn of the nineteenth century and in the few decades thereafter, none has been
more influential than what is generally referred to as ‘‘early Romanticism,’’ a group of
writers and thinkers who can be defined as a movement without much difficulty
since, for the most part, they knew one another, collaborated on projects, and shared a
set of ideals and aesthetic principles. Often referred to as the ‘‘Jena Romantics,’’ this
group, whose main activities took place between 1795 and 1800, clustered around the
brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and included their wives Dorothea
and Caroline, the young nobleman Friedrich von Hardenberg who wrote under the
name Novalis, and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The writer Ludwig Tieck and
the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, both of whom lived in
Berlin, also associated with the Jena Romantics and formed part of their circle.
Precursors and Intellectual Context
The intellectual background of early Romanticism can be traced back, most immediately, to Johann Georg Hamann with his religious enthusiasm and acquired distrust
of rationality, and above all to Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder, who himself had
been much influenced by Rousseau, privileged sentiment over reason in his writings
and cultivated a profound interest in the specific characteristics of different cultures,
which led him to study national traditions and ‘‘primitive’’ poetry. Every national
literature, he believed, was a reflection not only of its age but of the particular Volk
that had engendered it, and thus he judged it senseless to imitate the works of another
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people; rather, he believed, the writers of a nation should study how, for instance, the
works of the ancient Greeks reflected both their nation and the age, and from this
comparison learn how to produce works relevant to their own time and context.
Herder was associated, along with Goethe and Schiller, with the Sturm und Drang
(Storm and Stress) movement, which can be said to have given birth to Romanticism,
but while the two movements shared certain tastes (valuing sentiment over reason,
intensity over order, individual freedom over social stability, longing over fulfillment),
there were also key points in which they diverged. Storm and Stress literature emphasized the suffering of the individual under the established social order, but it tended to
accept as given both the oppressive social framework and the aesthetic categories
associated with it. Goethe’s 1774 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young
Werther), an epistolary novel which is arguably the greatest work of the Storm and
Stress, is radical in its subject matter (a young man’s love for a woman who happens to be
betrothed and then married to another; an act of suicide with which the reader is invited
to concur) but naturalistic in its presentation and formally straightforward. By contrast,
Friedrich Schlegel’s great Romantic novel Lucinde (1799), written a quarter of a century
later, is radical in both its subject and its form: Schlegel presents his paean to free love as
an often chaotic medley of narrative collage with scarcely a page of realistic storytelling
to be found in it anywhere. The writers of both the Storm and Stress and Romanticism
revered Shakespeare as a genius, but the former saw him as a figure of unbridled passion,
the latter as a brilliant craftsman and artist.
Most of the early Romantics (Novalis was eventually an exception) professed a
profound admiration for Goethe’s writings, and initially they were indebted to
Schiller as well. Schiller, who had been a professor of history at the University of
Jena since 1788, was instrumental in making Jena – a small town near Weimar – the
center of early Romanticism by encouraging August Wilhelm Schlegel to move there
in 1796 to collaborate more closely on Schiller’s journal Die Horen (The Horae) which
published, among other things, Schlegel’s influential ‘‘Brief über Poesie, Silbenmaß
und Sprache’’ (Letter on Poetry, Meter, and Language). Novalis studied briefly under
Schiller as a young man and greatly revered him.
Certain of Schiller’s writings contain decidedly proto-Romantic elements. His early
play Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) features a conflict between two brothers, one of
whom, Franz Moor, exemplifies the dangers of a rationality not tempered by feeling;
the play was rightly understood as critical of Enlightenment ideals. His important
Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man, 1795) describe two categories of degeneration: savagery and barbarism, the
former produced by a surfeit of feeling in the absence of thought, and the latter by an
unfeeling rationality. Clearly these ideas, like those of Hamann and Herder, influenced the young writers Schiller mentored.
By the time early Romanticism came on the scene, Goethe had turned from Storm
and Stress to Classicism. The literature of Classicism was initially perceived by the
young writers in Jena as no more antithetical to their project than Storm and Stress
had been. The Classicism of Goethe and Schiller, after all, emphasized the value of art
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and personal freedom as antidotes to the alienation of modern life, and at first this
shared set of concerns largely outweighed those tendencies of Classicism that were less
congenial to the Romantics, such as the insistence on disciplined, even rigid, literary
forms and the use of order and pattern to express what for the younger writers would
become formally unfettered subjectivity. Romanticism was first conceived as an
extension of the views of the Classicists taken to their logical extremes. August
Wilhelm Schlegel, for example, did not present Romanticism as opposed to Classicism until his series of Berlin lectures on literature and art in 1801-4, when he began
to argue for the existence of two separate literary traditions with different goals and
aesthetic principles. Those authors such as Corneille, Racine, and Molière who had
modeled themselves on the Roman classics, he argued, differed not just in degree but
in kind from those whom the Romantics claimed as their literary forebears: Pindar,
Sophocles, Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Calderón, and, of course, Shakespeare.
The antithesis between Weimar Classicism and Jena Romanticism developed only
gradually, by way of the Romantics’ explicit and implicit attacks on the idea of
Aristotelian mimesis (Behler 1993: 3). Where the Classicists revered the Romans, the
Romantics turned for inspiration to the ancient Greeks. They also came to see the
often monolithic works of the Classicists, with their emphasis on aesthetic harmony
and symmetry, as characterized by an inappropriate imposition of order. Every
achievement, every work that was ‘‘finished’’ and codified, would eventually run
afoul of the emerging Romantic ethos of the progressive and the infinite, the sense
that all art – like all philosophy and criticism – was a work eternally in progress,
something infinitely becoming. Romanticism, then, was oriented less toward the past
than toward the future. Rather than seeing language as referentially linked to the
world, the young Romantics extolled its figurative potential, its treasures of metaphor
and allegory. At the same time, paradoxically, all the spheres rejected by Romanticism
were also incorporated into it, for the sake of the ironic tensions to which this
bringing together of contradictory complementaries gave rise. In the end, the Romantic notion of absolute literature became so pure as to transcend any actual work
that had been written (Behler 1993: 7).
Two thematic areas in which early Romanticism differed from both Storm and
Stress and Classicism were knowledge and religion. While the Romantics, like the
Storm and Stress writers, distrusted the ability of reason alone to describe the world,
they were certainly not opposed to rationality and logical thought – indeed, they were
passionate readers of philosophy, including the difficult philosophical works being
written by their contemporaries (see Thomas Pfau’s chapter in this volume). Whereas
Enlightenment thought had construed the Fall of Man as an ultimately positive event,
one that forced individuals to become intellectually and morally self-reliant (since to
be truly good, one must will oneself to be good), for the Romantics it was an absolute
fall from grace, the destruction of all the unity and harmony that had ever existed in
the world. While Storm and Stress characters tended to suffer from an absence of
divine succor, a sense of having been abandoned by God, the early Romantics saw God
everywhere (in part subsumed into Nature), and thus the general tenor of their works
Early Romanticism in Germany
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was not mournful but rather joyous, a delight at the infinite possibilities offered by
the world. God in Classicism was omnipresent as well, but more as an abstract,
benign force than as part of Nature.
The Romantics maintained their reverence for Goethe even as their work developed
in a direction very different from his. Goethe himself never officially embraced
Romanticism, but neither did he dismiss it outright. His oft-quoted remark equating
the Romantic with ‘‘the sick’’ was made in reference to a specific mediocre work and
was certainly never intended as a barb against his neighbors in Jena. With Schiller,
matters stood differently. In 1797 he and Friedrich Schlegel traded devastating
critiques of one another’s work and eventually broke off all contact.
Another important influence on the young Romantics was the philosopher Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, a protégé of Kant’s who began teaching in Jena in 1794 and made a
strong impression on Friedrich Schlegel, particularly with his 1794 lectures on the
vocation of the scholar: Fichte declared it to lie in the very nature of man (as opposed
to God) never to achieve that for which he strives – the goal he aims for can only be
endlessly approximated. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (translated sometimes as ‘‘The
Science of Knowledge,’’ sometimes as ‘‘The Theory of Science’’) posits a self that is
not merely a transcendental condition for knowledge (as in Kant) but a creative
activity and the root of all reality – a notion that would come to influence Friedrich
Schlegel’s concept of irony. Unlike Schiller, Fichte maintained his enthusiasm for
revolution in general and the French Revolution in particular even after it had
devolved into the Reign of Terror. Eventually (in 1799) he was forced to resign his
teaching post after a scandal arose over charges that his philosophy was atheistic.
The other Jena philosopher important to the Romantics was Schelling, who was
only 23 years old in 1798 when he was given a university post at Fichte’s recommendation. As a 15 year old, he had entered the Theological Seminary of the University of
Tübingen, where he befriended fellow students Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and
Friedrich Hölderlin. Schelling’s philosophy was based on Fichte’s idea of the pure ego
as the unique metaphysical principle, but he differed from Fichte in his concept of
Nature. Schelling proposed a philosophical model based on the dual, complementary
but opposed standpoints of subject and object, or spirit and Nature, which coexist,
supplementing and supporting one another, without either being able to encompass
the other.
Jena Romanticism did not fully develop until after a cross-pollination with Berlin,
where, on a sojourn in 1797, Friedrich Schlegel made the acquaintance of Ludwig
Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Berlin at the
time was a burgeoning center of intellectual activity, with important literary salons
hosted invariably by women, many of them Jewish, which brought together writers,
artists, and philosophers for long evenings of discussion. Henriette Herz, who was a
friend of Schleiermacher’s and translated at least one book that appeared under his
name, and Rahel Levin (Rahel Varnhagen after her later marriage), were two of the
most prominent hostesses. In 1798, August Wilhelm followed Friedrich to Berlin,
where the two of them founded the journal Athenäum, which continued to appear
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until 1800 and by many accounts was itself one of the major achievements of early
Romanticism. The Athenäum published some of the most important works of the new
‘‘school’’ including Novalis’s series of fragments Blütenstaub (Pollen). When Friedrich
Schlegel returned to Jena in 1799, Wackenroder and Tieck followed him. Schleiermacher remained behind in Berlin, where he held a position as a pastor (as well as an
appointment at the Charité, a public hospital), and took over the editorship of the
Athenäum. When the University of Berlin was founded in 1810 by the brothers
Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, he joined its faculty in theology.
The Schlegels and Novalis: Universal Poetry
Of all the early Romantics, the one who has cast the longest shadow as viewed from
the twenty-first century is clearly Friedrich Schlegel, whose great contribution was to
propose and adumbrate an inextricable linkage between poetry and criticism. ‘‘A
distinctive characteristic of modern poetry,’’ he wrote in 1808, ‘‘is its precise relationship to criticism and theory and the crucial influence they exert on it’’ (Ein
unterscheidendes Merkmal der modernen Dichtkunst ist ihr genaues Verhältnis zur
Kritik und Theorie, und der bestimmende Einflub der letzteren; Schlegel 1972:
361).1 Though he published a book of poems in 1800, he is best known for his
critical essays, his novel Lucinde (1799), and the two sequences of fragments he
published in the Lyceum der Schönen Künste (1797) and the Athenäum (1798). Lucinde
quickly gave rise to both a scandal and a debate. Schleiermacher published (anonymously) a defense of the novel, but the book was widely decried as immoral and lacking
in literary value (a judgment that persisted well into the twentieth century). Lucinde’s
notoriety stemmed largely from the fact that it appeared to be a roman à clef, with
figures readily associable with Schlegel himself, Dorothea (who was not yet his wife),
his brother August Wilhelm, Caroline, and Novalis, suggesting that the philosophically tinged lasciviousness put forth in the novel was autobiographical. ‘‘We embraced one another,’’ the narrator reports, ‘‘with equal measures of exuberance and
religion’’ (Wir umarmten uns mit eben so viel Ausgelassenheit als Religion; Schlegel
1963: 8). Meanwhile the book was seen as thumbing its nose at the whole institution
of the novel; while it certainly has structural principles of its own, it eschews linear
narration for a mix of genres, full of detours and digressions from the ostensible
narrative, self-proclaimed allegorical passages, and sections of philosophical reflection
that touch on subject matters which many of the book’s readers at the time must have
considered undignified. Lucinde remained a fragment; Schlegel’s plans for a second
volume were never carried out.
But Schlegel is known primarily as a critic, one whose legacy reaches into the
present, in large part because his work was taken up by Walter Benjamin, above all in
his 1919 dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept
of Aesthetic Criticism in German Romanticism; Benjamin 1973). Schlegel is the
author of a seminal essay on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (‘‘Über Goethes Meister,’’ which
Early Romanticism in Germany
91
was quickly dubbed ‘‘the Übermeister’’) as well as studies of Greek poetry, Lessing,
‘‘incomprehensibility’’ (Unverständlichkeit), the nature of criticism, and poetry. For
Schlegel, the true work of the critic is not the evaluation of individual works.2
Criticism, like poetry itself, is a constantly evolving activity, one that takes place
within the subject, which is thereby elevated above the constrictions of society and its
value-assigning mechanisms. Criticism, as he saw it, also had the task of uniting
many different spheres: reason with the imagination, intellect with feeling, the outer
world with the inner life of the individual, not to mention all the different arts and
other sorts of human endeavors. Thus the three great events he considered to have
transformed the world are drawn from three quite different realms: the French
Revolution, the publication of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.
Friedrich Schlegel received public recognition as a scholar-critic early on, in 1795
when he was only 23, and quickly became a sought-after contributor to various
contemporary journals including Deutschland as well as the Lyceum der Schönen Künste
and Schiller’s Die Horen. In fact, much of our notion of early Romanticism comes from
Schlegel’s famous fragments, particularly Fragment 116 (of the Athenäum fragments),
which is perhaps the single most important statement of Romantic poetics:
Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht
bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen und die Poesie mit der
Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will und soll auch Poesie und Prosa,
Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen,
die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, den
Witz poetisieren und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegnem Bildungsstoff jeder Art
anfüllen und sättigen und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. Sie umfaßt
alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden
Systeme der Kunst bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in
kunstlosen Gesang. [ . . . ] Nur sie kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten
zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen
Interesse, auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion
immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen.
[ . . . ] Andere Dichtarten sind fertig und können nun vollständig zergliedert werden. Die
romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig
nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann. Sie kann durch keine Theorie erschöpft werden, und
nur eine divinatorische Kritik dürfte es wagen, ihr Ideal charakterisieren zu wollen. Sie
allein ist unendlich, wie sie allein frei ist und das als ihr erstes Gesetz anerkennt, daß die
Willkür des Dichters kein Gesetz über sich leide. Die romantische Dichtart ist die einzige,
die mehr als Art und gleichsam die Dichtkunst selbst ist: denn in einem gewissen Sinn ist
oder soll alle Poesie romantisch sein. (Schlegel 1972: 37-8)
Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the
separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries
to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art
and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society
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poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good,
solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor. It
embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art, containing
within themselves still further systems, to the sigh, the kiss that the poetizing child
breathes forth in artless song. [ . . . ] It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the
whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also – more than any other
form – hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real
and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection
again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.
[ . . . ] Other kinds of poetry are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed.
The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real
essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted
by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its idea. It
alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that
the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the
only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense
all poetry is or should be romantic. (Schlegel 1991: 31-2)
Romantic poetry, in Schlegel’s description, is all-encompassing: it embraces all forms,
all genres, even nature and society, and by definition is a work in progress, not a
completed edifice. Thus the series of fragments (not yet complete, and always rearrangeable) is the ideal Romantic form (in the words of Rudolf Gasché, ‘‘a manifesto of
Romantic exigency’’; Gasché 1991: ix). Indeed, as Schlegel’s Athenäum fragments attest,
the form even defied the notion of individual authorship: Schlegel’s own fragments
were interspersed with some by other hands (including August Wilhelm, Schleiermacher, and Novalis). In the copy of the Athenäum owned by Rahel Levin Varnhagen (and
now in the collection of the Staatsbibliothek preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin),
handwritten notes in the margins identify a number of the fragments written by
authors other than Schlegel. The work of art, then, transcends even the individual
artist: it is universal, eternal, infinite, communal and eternally in flux.
Two crucial concepts in Schlegel’s criticism are reflection and irony. Irony, he
proposes in Lyceum Fragment 42, may be defined as ‘‘logical beauty.’’ This is not the
mere rhetorical gesture to which the term ‘‘irony’’ can also be applied; Schlegel’s
‘‘divine breath of irony’’ suffuses ancient and modern poems alike: ‘‘Es lebt in ihnen
eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im Innern die Stimmung, welche alles
übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst,
Tugend oder Genialität: im Äußern, in der Ausführung die mimische Manier eines
gewöhnlichen guten italienischen Buffo’’ (Schlegel 1972: 12) ([They are] informed by
a truly transcendental buffoonery. Internally: the mood that surveys everything and
rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius;
externally, in its execution: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo;
Schlegel 1991: 6-7).
Romantic irony as here defined is structural, a mood, position, or subjective
potential, a liberation (perhaps only briefly) from the received tradition and social
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contract that would presume to determine value. Irony as a stance for the artist is not
an escape from reality – it requires the tension between reflection and social reality,
including the distance from one’s own artistic production. As Friedrich Schlegel
‘‘defines’’ it, ‘‘Ironie ist die Form des Paradoxon. Paradox ist alles, was zugleich gut
und groß ist’’ (Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously
good and great; Lyceum Fragment 48, Schlegel 172: 8). Schlegel’s formulation, itself
apparently paradoxical, reflects the form of what it is describing. That which is
‘‘good’’ partakes of the (social) framework of value, that which is ‘‘great’’ rises above
it. To be both ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘great’’ at once is to stand simultaneously within and
beyond this sphere. Irony, then, is the form of this double standing and is closely
linked with Schlegel’s concept of ‘‘reflection,’’ which also looks in two directions at
once: the thought is at once the thought of the thing and of the thought’s thinking of
the thing, producing a structure of infinite regression (or, more accurately, since
Romanticism is about growth and increase rather than falling away) of progression.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich’s older brother who also assisted in his
education, is not now known for his own literary writings (though he did write
poetry and published a play, Ion, in 1803). One of his two major contributions to early
Romanticism was his series of public lectures on literature, by means of which he
drew attention to the new Romantic writers, presenting their work as the logical
culmination of a tradition of writing that stood distinctly apart from French and
French-influenced Classicism. The other was his brilliant translation of 17 of Shakespeare’s plays, which are still canonical today and serve as the source of sayings and
quotations just as the originals do in English. The first 16 of these plays – including
Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet – appeared
between 1797 and 1800, with a final translation (Richard III) following in 1810. (For
more on the role of Shakespeare reception in Romanticism, see Heike Grundmann’s
chapter in this volume.)
Novalis began his law studies in 1790, at the age of 18, studying first in Jena and
then in Leipzig, where he and Friedrich Schlegel became friends. In 1794 he received
his degree and shortly afterward took up a post in the family trade, working as a saltmine administrator, but through a series of visits and letters maintained contact with
the rest of the circle, particularly Friedrich Schlegel. Novalis’s life was tragically short.
In 1797 he was deeply shaken by the death, after long illness, of his beloved fiancée
Sophia von Kühn, and in 1801 himself succumbed to lung disease.
Where both the Schlegel brothers were, in different ways, scholarly, historical, and
systematic in their work, Novalis was mystical and metaphysical. For him, this meant
pursuing a mode of philosophy not indebted to a historical consciousness of philosophical tradition. He carefully studied the works of Fichte (sometimes in the
company of Friedrich Schlegel), and then those of Kant and Schelling, seeking in
them a framework he could use to develop his own brand of philosophy. As he
announced to Schlegel, he had every intention of outphilosophizing Schelling, by
developing a ‘‘religion of the visible universe’’ (quoted in Behler 1993: 181), which
would unite the world we see and the world beyond our grasp, subjectivity and
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objectivity into a universal, symbolic whole. Feeling no obligation to be systematic in
his reflections, Novalis combined philosophy and poetry freely, making frequent use
of the terms ‘‘Romantic,’’ ‘‘mystical’’ and ‘‘infinite’’:
Der Sinn für Poësie hat viel mit dem Sinn für Mystizism gemein. Er ist der Sinn für das
Eigenthümliche, Personelle, Unbekannte, Geheimnißvolle, zu Offenbarende, das
Nothwendigzufällige. Er stellt das Undarstellbare dar. Er sieht das Unsichtbare, fühlt
das Unfühlbare etc. Kritik der Poësie ist Unding. Schwer schon ist es zu entscheiden,
doch einzig mögliche Entscheidung, ob etwas Poësie sey, oder nicht. Der Dichter ist
wahrhaft sinnberaubt – dafür kommt alles in ihm vor. Er stellt im eigentlichsten Sinn
Subj[ect] Obj[ect] vor – Gemüth und Welt. Daher die Unendlichkeit eines guten Gedichts,
die Ewigkeit. Der Sinn für P[oësie] hat nahe Verwandtschaft mit dem Sinn der
Weissagung und dem religiösen, dem Sehersinn überhaupt. Der Dichter ordnet, vereinigt, wählt, erfindet – und es ist ihm selbst unbegreiflich, warum gerade so und nicht
anders. (Novalis 1960: 685-6)
(The sense for poetry has much in common with that for mysticism. It is the sense for
the peculiar, personal, unknown, mysterious, for what is to be revealed, the necessaryaccidental. It represents the unrepresentable. It sees the invisible, feels the unfeelable,
etc. Criticism of poetry is an absurdity. Although difficult to decide, the only possible
distinction is whether something is poetry or not. The poet is truly deprived in this
sense – instead, everything happens within him. He represents in the most genuine
manner subject-object – mind and world. Hence the infinity is a good poem, the eternity.
The sense for poetry has a close relationship with the sense for augury and the religious
sense, with the sense for prophecy in general. The poet organizes, unites, chooses,
invents – why precisely so and not otherwise, is incomprehensible even to himself.)
(quoted in Behler 1993: 183)
Novalis is now known primarily for his collection of 114 fragments entitled Blütenstaub (Pollen) which was published in the Athenäum in 1798, for the novel Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, and for his long poem Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night) – the
last two of these works were published only posthumously. The fragments that
comprise Blütenstaub closely resemble those of Friedrich Schlegel (indeed, several of
them are now believed to have been written by Schlegel), yet while Schlegel understood his collections of fragments as themselves finished works in a genre to be
understood as quintessentially Romantic, fragments for Novalis were stepping-stones,
brief glimpses into an ongoing work-in-progress and part of the larger development
of his thought. Blütenstaub is preceded by an epigraph: ‘‘Friends, the soil is poor, we
must sow seeds in abundance if we are to enjoy even meager harvests’’ (Freunde, der
Boden ist arm, wir müßen reichlichen Samen Ausstreun, daß uns doch nur mäßige
Erndten gedeihn; Novalis 1989: 296). (Ernst Behler, one of the most important
scholars of Romanticism, notes that ‘‘Novalis’’ is a Latin rendering of the poet’s
family name, ‘‘Hardenberg’’ or ‘‘fallow land’’; Behler 1993: 43). These ‘‘seeds’’ or
reflections are records of Novalis’s attempt to establish a model for a human thinking
presence in the world, one that is in equal measure poetic and philosophical and that
Early Romanticism in Germany
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declares itself most often metaphorically, by analogy. ‘‘Our entire capacity for perception,’’ he writes, ‘‘resembles the eye’’; ‘‘We will never fully grasp ourselves, but what
we will and can do with regard to ourselves goes far beyond grasping’’ (Unser
sämtliches Wahrnehmungsvermögen gleicht dem Auge; Ganz begreifen werden wir
uns nie, aber wir werden und können uns weit mehr, als begreifen; Novalis 1989:
296-7).
The principal topics around which Novalis’s work is structured are religion, love,
poetry, and death. Hymnen an die Nacht, a six-part poem written mainly in prose and
published in the Athenäum in 1800, tells of a longing for a ‘‘holy, ineffable, mysterious
night’’ (der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht) and for death,
intertwined realms of beauty, love (including erotic love), innocence, and oneness
with Nature and with God. The poem melds earthly love with religious feeling; its
final stanza proclaims a journey ‘‘to my sweet bride, / To Jesus, my beloved’’
(Hinunter zu der süßen Braut, / Zu Jesus, dem Geliebten; Novalis 1989: 196,
207). In Novalis’s essay ‘‘Die Christenheit oder Europa’’ (Christianity or Europe), a
crucial document of the early Romantics’ move towards Catholicism, he attacks
Protestantism and the post-Reformation civilization of Europe as coldly rationalistic
and contrasts them with a vision of Catholicism drawn from the Middle Ages: an age
of political and spiritual unity and peace. Friedrich Schlegel would embrace Catholicism several years later (converting, along with his entire family), and a number of the
younger generation of Romantics followed his example.
Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen was to have been a massive work, but what
we have of it is only its first volume and a fragment of the second. The tale of a young
man’s quest to become a poet, it has often been compared to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, a novel Novalis initially admired and later rejected as bourgeois,
prosaic, and hostile to everything mystical and poetic. Heinrich von Ofterdingen contains a good deal of historical realistic writing (it is set during the Middle Ages in the
time of the Crusades and includes, for instance, an encounter with miners who speak
of their work), but it also features fantastic encounters with the supernatural, dreams
that impinge on reality, and interspersed poems. The goal of Heinrich’s philosophical
and poetic aspirations is emblematized by a blue flower with a girl’s face he sees in a
dream – this is the famous blue flower of Romanticism – which he later recognizes as
bearing the face of Mathilde, daughter of the bard Klingsohr who becomes his
mentor. The fairy-tale elements of the novel were, in Novalis’s plan for its completion,
gradually to have taken over the novel, forming a synthesis of the prosaic and the
mythical, the mundane and the supernatural. (For a more detailed analysis, see the
chapter in this volume by Roger Paulin.)
Other Major Figures in Early Romanticism
Among the Berlin Romantics, Ludwig Tieck was one of the best-known writers of his
day, but the only works of his still widely read are his supernatural fairy tales Der
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blonde Eckbert (Blond Eckbert, 1797) and Der Runenberg (The Rune Mountain, 1804),
and to a lesser extent his satirical, humorous plays, especially Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss
in Boots, 1797). He is widely (though erroneously) assumed to have collaborated with
August Wilhelm Schlegel on the latter’s canonical Shakespeare translations, still
known in Germany as ‘‘The Schlegel–Tieck Shakespeare’’; in fact, his principal
contribution to the project was to recruit his daughter Dorothea Tieck and a young
acquaintance, Wolf Graf Baudissin, to translate the plays Schlegel hadn’t got around
to so that Schlegel’s publisher in Berlin, Reimer, would be able to issue a complete
edition of Shakespeare’s works in German. Tieck introduced revisions into the text of
Schlegel’s translations to which the latter objected so bitterly in a letter to his
publisher that they were subsequently removed. Tieck’s own 1801 translation of
Don Quixote, however, was well received. His early novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
(Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings, 1798), set like Heinrich von Ofterdingen in the Middle
Ages, was dismissed as an unsuccessful imitation of Wilhelm Meister.
Tieck also edited (adding material of his own) his friend Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder’s important work of aesthetic theory, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-loving Friar, 1797), which appeared only
months before its author’s untimely death. (Tieck’s editorial additions are generally
held not to sit well with the rest of the book.) Wackenroder writes of art (and poetry
and music) in a manner tinged with longing for a bygone age in which artistic
enthusiasm was not yet enervated by reason, and art and religion were closely allied.
Thus the artists he writes of – including the Renaissance painters Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael, as well as Dürer, who is given pride of place at the
book’s center – can be understood as parallel to the Romantic canon of literary
forebears established by August Wilhelm Schlegel. The Herzensergießungen influenced
the other Romantics as well in their turn toward the Medieval period and Catholicism.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was trained in philosophy and classical
philology as well as theology and is now known for his translations of Plato and his
pioneering work on hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation) as well as his writings
on religion. His project of translating Plato’s dialogues was originally planned as a
collaboration with Friedrich Schlegel, with whom Schleiermacher shared living
quarters during Schlegel’s sojourn in Berlin from 1797 to 1799. Schleiermacher’s
most influential work on the philosophy of religion, ‘‘Über die Religion: Reden an die
Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern’’ (On Religion: Speeches Addressed to its Cultured
Detractors, 1799), was written at the behest of his fellow Romantics and argued for
the validity of multiple forms of religion, including those that eschew the notion of
human immortality and even the existence of God. His ideas about hermeneutics
brought together linguistic, psychological, and philosophical interpretation with
biblical exegesis, and were deeply indebted to Herder. Schleiermacher’s 1813 essay
‘‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’’ (On the Different Methods of
Translating) is the most important work of translation theory from this period (others
were written by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Goethe).
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The women of early Romanticism authored relatively little – which is hardly
surprising for women at this time – and thus are known to us primarily through
their letters and what biographical information has come down to us. The wives of
both Schlegel brothers, however, were influential members of the circle, and one of
them, Dorothea, wrote a novel that appeared under her husband’s name. Dorothea, née
Brendel Mendelssohn, was the daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn. She left her first husband, the banker Simon Veit, for Friedrich
Schlegel, who was eight years her junior, and she is generally assumed to have been
the model for the title figure in Schlegel’s scandalous novel Lucinde. Dorothea
Schlegel’s own novel, Florentin, the tale of a passionate young man, is not considered
a major work of Romantic literature, though it does employ various self-conscious
narrative devices (albeit grafted onto an otherwise conventional storyline).
Caroline Schlegel, née Michaelis, the daughter of a Göttingen professor, was
widowed young after the death of the physician Johann Franz Wilhelm Böhmer.
She inspired the love of both Schlegel brothers, but eventually married August
Wilhelm in 1796 after having taken part in the Mainz Republic – a group of German
intellectuals petitioned the French National Assembly in 1793 to have Mainz
integrated into the French Republic – an adventure that left her both pregnant and
(briefly) incarcerated. As August Wilhelm’s wife, she is known to have collaborated
closely with him on many of his lectures and on his great Shakespeare translations (the
manuscripts show both their handwritings), work for which she was never officially
credited (Bernays 1981). Eventually their marriage soured and in 1801 she married
the much younger Friedrich Schelling.
Three great authors of the period who intersected only marginally if at all with the
early Romantics but are sometimes classed among them are Friedrich Hölderlin,
Heinrich von Kleist, and Jean Paul Richter (known simply as Jean Paul). Hölderlin,
the greatest poet of the age, studied theology at the seminary in Tübingen as a young
man along with Hegel and Schelling, and spent time in Jena in 1794 and 1795, where
he had contact with Schiller, met Goethe, and attended Fichte’s lectures. He is known
to have met Novalis in May 1795 at the home of the philosopher Friedrich Immanuel
Niethammer when he came to Jena to visit Schiller, but their contact does not seem to
have gone beyond this one encounter (Behler 1993: 14, 17). Like the Jena Romantics,
Hölderlin was fascinated by the literature and culture of the ancient Greeks. He
sought to emulate them not directly, but through a complex understanding of
cultural individuality. He wrote frequently in classical forms and spoke of the
impoverishment of the ‘‘Hesperian age,’’ in which all traces of the Hellenic unity of
life and art, forged in a world in which humans had direct access to the gods and
divine understanding and guidance, had been lost. Hölderlin’s poetry is characterized
by a profound (and untranslatable) syntactical complexity, one that owes its character
to the Greek language. Indeed, Hölderlin also translated from the Greek – Sophocles
and Pindar above all – and his translations display a syntax even more intricate in part
than the Greek originals. Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, 1797-9) is a novel comprised of letters written to a
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German named Bellarmin (‘‘the good German’’) by his Greek friend Hyperion, who
has returned to his homeland in a time of war, during the Greek struggle in 1770 to
escape Turkish rule. The novel thematizes the contrasts between both the Golden Age
of Ancient Greece and the impoverished present, on the one hand, and the inherent
unity of Nature and the fractured state of humankind and human society, on the
other. The book’s famous penultimate section contains a scathing condemnation of the
German national character: ‘‘Barbarians of long standing who have become more
barbaric still through their diligence and science and even their religion, profoundly
incapable of any sort of divine feeling . . . ’’ (Barbaren von Alters her, durch Fleiß und
Wissenschaft und selbst durch Religion barbarischer geworden, tiefunfähig jedes
göttlichen Gefühls; Hölderlin 1992, I: 754). This discomfort with the German
bourgeois status quo and the longing for a state of absolute transcendence – oneness
with Nature, unity with the gods, and the return of a lost age – are concerns
Hölderlin shared with his contemporaries in Jena.
The works of Heinrich von Kleist and Jean Paul also contain elements reminiscent
of early Romanticism. Kleist’s stories and plays in particular valorize feeling over
rationality and speak of human inability to attain certain knowledge of the world; like
the Romantics, he was reading Kant and Fichte. Kleist and Jean Paul both turned
against the aesthetic program of Weimar Classicism; Jean Paul even parodied Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister in his Bildungsroman Titan (1800-3). But neither figure interacted
with the members of the Romantic circle – they arrived on the scene a few years later
than the others, for one thing – and the Romantics’ central literary-utopian project of
universal progressive poetry finds no reflection in their work.
One important area in which the work of the Jena Romantics diverges from that of
Kleist and Hölderlin is their sense of God’s presence in Nature as a benign, meaningbringing force. In Kleist’s work, by contrast, God appears as a force beyond human
comprehension whose effects often appear arbitrary, possibly even malevolent. And
Hölderlin’s poetry is one long lament over the destitution of a humankind that has
been abandoned by the gods – the Greek deities and Jesus Christ often appear in his
work as part of a single continuum. In Hölderlin’s work, flashes of divinity may still
appear in Nature, but these glimpses are fleeting, and all that is left for us to do is
hope for a return to an age of divine grace, something that can perhaps be facilitated
by the work of poets.
Conclusion
What all the various figures of early Romanticism had in common was the belief that
the prevailing literary and philosophical edifices of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Idealism, and Classicism were inadequate to represent the complexities not
only of the human spirit but of a society still wracked by revolution and upheaval. In
their place, they set about producing what Behler (1993: ix) describes as ‘‘a rupture
within the system of mimesis and representation that had dominated European
Early Romanticism in Germany
99
aesthetic thought.’’ The Romantics’ underlying distrust of logic, coherence, and
completion inspired both philosophical systems based on eternal becoming and
works of literature that resisted the traditional strictures of form. As Walter Benjamin
wrote in his dissertation, ‘‘The Romantics did not, like the Enlightenment, conceive
of form as a rule for producing beauty in art that must necessarily be followed if the
work was to have a pleasing or edifying effect. Rather, they saw form neither as a rule
nor as independent of rules’’ (Benjamin 1973: 71). The quintessentially early Romantic forms of the fragment, the journal, and the novel combining bits and pieces
drawn from a wide range of different genres, provided the basis for a group of works
which crossed the boundaries established by both Storm and Stress and Classicism to
produce a new sort of art that, rather than rejecting these earlier ‘‘stages of development,’’ made them the fertile soil for blue flowers of many sorts.
The Jena circle of Romantics effectively disbanded in 1800. Novalis was on his
deathbed. Friedrich Schlegel submitted his dissertation at the University of Jena and
began to lecture there, but with little success, and soon thereafter he left with
Dorothea for Dresden and then Paris. Caroline Schlegel divorced August Wilhelm
Schlegel to marry Schelling, and only a few years afterward August Wilhelm accepted
an invitation from Madame de Staël, author of the stunningly successful De l’Allemagne, to join her household in Coppet on Lake Geneva, as an advisor to her and tutor
to her children. For all intents and purposes, then, early Romanticism was over – but
though it lasted barely five years, it left behind an intellectual and artistic legacy that
continues to influence the way we think about literature and art to this day.
Notes
1 All translations are mine unless otherwise
noted.
2 An early note by Schlegel, often quoted out of
context, does state that the task of the critic is
to determine the value of works of art, but this
is a position from which he soon departs and to
which he never returns.
References and Further Reading
Behler, Ernst (1993). German Romantic Literary
Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1973). Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, ed. Hermann
Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Bernays, Michael (1981). ‘‘Vorrede und Nachwort
zum neuen Abdruck des Schlegel-Tieckschen
Shakespeare.’’ Preussische Jahrbücher 68 (3):
524-69.
Gasché, Rudolf (1991). ‘‘Foreword: Ideality in
Fragmentation.’’ In Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota
Press.
Hölderlin, Friedrich (1992). Sämtliche Werke
und Briefe, ed. Michael Knaupp. Munich: Hanser.
Novalis (1960). Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich
von Hardenbergs, 3, ed. Richard Samuel with
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Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Novalis (1989). Dichtungen und Fragmente, ed.
Claus Träger. Leipzig: Reclam.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1963). Lucinde, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1972). Schriften zur Literatur,
ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch. Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1991). Philosophical Fragments,
trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis and Oxford:
University of Minnesota Press.
6
From Autonomous Subjects to
Self-regulating Structures:
Rationality and Development in
German Idealism
Thomas Pfau
The Sociality of Reason: Rationality, Autonomy, and Community
in Kant
Responding to a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical projects (Cartesianism, Leibnizian theories of preformation, Lockean empiricism, and
Humean skepticism), the writings of German Idealism develop fundamentally new,
emphatically systematic conceptions of subjectivity. In their own diverse and progressive pursuit of this project, the main representatives of German Idealism (Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) thereby also bring about a transformation of the very
meaning of ‘‘system’’ and, ultimately, of philosophy itself as it evolves from Kant’s
‘‘critical’’ to Hegel’s ‘‘speculative-historical’’ modeling of reason. Notwithstanding its
highly specialized, ostensibly hermetic discursive profile, German Idealism remains
embedded within much broader shifts that drastically alter the late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century understanding of agency (Subjektivität), sociality (Öffentlichkeit), and (self-)cultivation (Bildung). A sociological sketch of these wider currents will
indicate how and for what reasons the emphatically dynamic, mobile, and developmental conceptions of agency unfolded by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel took on
such rigorously technical characteristics and why in particular these writers chose to
place emphasis on the formal criteria – that is, on the ‘‘conditions’’ of evidence,
explicitness, and justification always in play when we speak of a subject. Seen within a
broader sociological analysis of modernity, German Idealism constitutes but one of
numerous ‘‘expert systems’’ (such as the emergent disciplines of legal theory, hermeneutics, aesthetics, linguistics, or probability theory), all of them rapidly consolidating
themselves as quasi-autonomous, ‘‘professional’’ languages at the end of the
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eighteenth century (see Giddens 1990: 55-63, Ziolkowski 1990: 3-17, 218-308,
Sheehan 1989: 145-73). While the philosophical arguments of German Idealism
have long been understood to represent a major break with Cartesian rationalism or
Humean skepticism, their Weberian (Protestant) work ethic of a self-generating
subject axiomatically tied to a developmental model of rationality and, by that very
token, to its own progressive socialization, also situates the technical expertise of a
Kant or a Hegel in the broader plot of modernity.
The canonical texts of German Idealism – from Kant’s three Critiques (1781-90)
via Fichte’s various drafts of the Science of Knowledge or his Reden an die Deutsche Nation
(1808), Schelling’s versions of a Philosophy of Nature (1797-9) and his System of
Transcendental Idealism (1800) to Hegel’s Phenomenology (1807), Logic (1815), Encyclopedia (1817), and his Philosophy of History (1822-3) – can be read as reflexes of a
particular phase (late Enlightenment and Romanticism) within the evolving story of
modernity. For a long time, that story itself was told as one of progressive secularization, as ‘‘a vision of an ultimate end, as both finis and telos, . . . provid[ing] a scheme
of progressive order and meaning, a scheme which has been capable of overcoming the
ancient fear of fate and fortune’’ (Löwith 1949: 18). Against Max Weber’s and Karl
Löwith’s influential portrayal of modernity as such a process of secularization – a
thesis often thought to have received its first and most consummate articulation in
the philosophy of Hegel – Hans Blumenberg has urged a reading of post-Reformation
modernity as a series of ‘‘reoccupations’’ of original Judaeo-Christian problems. On
this reading, the Cartesian cogito does not so much amount to a secular break with
Ockham’s nominalism. Rather, Descartes is read as offering a more fulsome rearticulation of the problem of a dualism that Ockham himself had already inherited
from the Gnostics (Blumenberg 1983: 37-76; see also Taylor 1989: 143-58, Pippin
1999: 22-8). For Blumenberg, Judaeo-Christian thought and secular modernity
remain connected by a set of fundamental questions; what differs are primarily their
strategies of how to shape answers to these questions – less in an effort to settle them
once and for all than, pragmatically, to legitimate their own, obviously changed
historical situation.
In this barest outline, Blumenberg’s thesis would ask sensibly that we read the
conceptual innovations of Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism as a distinctive phase in
a larger and ongoing struggle with defining a legitimate and internally cohesive
model of agency, a narrative whose beginnings may at least date back to St Augustine.
Not coincidentally, beginning with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the framework
within which Idealist philosophy seeks to locate the reception of its specific narratives
is always that of a full-scale conversion of the reader’s sense of his or her self and its
relation to the world. To read the philosophical narratives of Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
or Hegel within post-schismatic modernity’s overall quest for self-legitimation is not,
however, to approach the principal texts of German Idealism as mere reflexes of a
particular set of social, economic, and cultural forces. Rather, the objective will be to
articulate Idealism’s specific contribution of new and especially plausible languages of
self-description and self-legitimation. We should give due weight to the fact that,
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103
beginning with Kant, the philosophical legitimation of a new type of agency is no
longer the exclusive province of a narrow scholarly elite, nor indeed does it unfold as a
recondite, scholastic inquiry deemed safe by hereditary political elites. Instead, the
group seeking and attaining legitimacy through the discursive and conceptual projects of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel are the liberal-democratic, professional, middle-class
communities and nation states of Western Europe as they consolidate themselves
between 1780 and 1830. Kantian ‘‘autonomy,’’ Fichtean ‘‘vocation’’ (Bestimmung), and
the Hegelian ‘‘state’’ all aim to secure the intrinsic rationality and vicarious sociality
of the modern, disaggregated individual. In one way or another, the philosophical
systems in question all aim to provide a materially altered subject with both the
impetus and a logical trajectory for transforming itself into a legitimate and progressively more self-conscious social agent. Hence, far from being hemmed in by extrinsic
(socioeconomic and political) forces, German Idealism itself constitutes such a force in
its own right, a particularly sophisticated idiom within a broad network of innovative
discourses and, thus, as part of a variegated conceptual armature marshaled by the
emergent middle-class, liberal-democratic, and bureaucratic nation state so as to
understand its historical epoch and legitimate its own standing within it. Not
coincidentally, the following brief glimpse into Kant’s critical method at work
shows several of its key concepts – such as transcendental reflection, transcendental
aesthetics (space/time), and a strictly formal concept of moral agency – intimately
entwined with much broader socioeconomic transformations of the late Enlightenment.
Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason opens not so much with an outright rejection of
the concept of experience but with the curious hypothetical statement that ‘‘experiential knowledge might quite possibly be already something composite [ein Zusammengesetztes] of what we receive by way of intuition and what is spontaneously
furnished by our cognitive faculties [Erkenntnisvermögen].’’ The involvement of the
latter, meanwhile, is said to constitute ‘‘an additive [Zusatz] that we cannot distinguish from the basic matter of experiential data until extended practice has drawn our
attention to this circumstance and has schooled us to make discriminations in this
manner’’ (Kant 1969: 41-2). Kant’s opening remarks already advance two claims that
reciprocally confirm one another: first, that the possibility of knowledge rests on
something logically prior to the deceptive primacy of experiential data and also prior
to our intuitive mechanisms for the reception of such data; and, second, that in order
to grasp such a counterintuitive theory of knowledge, we must effectively abandon all
hope for speedy proof and submit to the ‘‘extended discipline’’ (lange Übung) of
transcendental reflection. Ultimately, Kant’s Critique proposes itself as the only
available manual for this new type of cognitive proficiency. For Kant’s Critique
‘‘constructs theoretical entities that serve his purpose. There is no empirical confirmation of Kant’s hypothesis, however, since what counts as experience, and also as
confirmation, is created by our acceptance of that hypothesis’’ (Rosen 1987: 25). In
this manner, the Kantian project of a ‘‘critique’’ of reason, of setting limits to the
kinds of claims that can responsibly and autonomously be made by and for the
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modern individual, comes at the expense of a pervasive disorientation that, in the
domain of empirical, socioeconomic phenomena a sociologist like Anthony Giddens
has called ‘‘disembedding,’’ a ‘‘ ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space’’ (Giddens
1990: 21).
In his ‘‘transcendental doctrine of elements’’ for the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
famously asserts that time and space do ‘‘not represent any property of things in
themselves’’ but, in fact, constitute solely ‘‘the form of all appearances of outer
sense . . . [or] the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer [or, in
the case of time, inner] intuition is possible for us’’ (Kant 1969: 71). Such a position
both reflects and reinforces a transformation – fueled by increasingly abstract and
complex forms of economic production and legal-bureaucratic administration –
already well advanced in England yet also, if more slowly, underway in Germany.
Just as the clock came to express ‘‘a uniform dimension of ‘empty’ time,’’ we can
observe the concurrent ‘‘separation of space from place,’’ with the latter becoming
‘‘increasingly phantasmagoric . . . [as] locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped
in terms of social influences quite distant from them’’ (Giddens 1990: 17-19; on time,
see also Sheehan 1989: 799). With time and space conceived as abstract or, in Kant’s
language, ‘‘transcendental’’ conditions of possibility for intuition, the definition of
rationality shifts from Cartesian self-awareness to a logic of strictly equivalent
measures. Time is no longer rhythmic in ways so eloquently captured at the opening
of Johann Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages. Rather, once divided into strictly
abstract and equivalent chronological measurements, this new, abstract time exemplifies a rationality that everywhere ‘‘excises the incommensurable; not only are
qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought into actual conformity’’ (Adorno
and Horkheimer 1972: 12).1
For another example, we turn to the conception of the ‘‘public sphere’’ that Kant
sets forth in his political essays of the mid-1780s, and that he was to develop in
greater detail and at the level of ‘‘transcendental’’ argument in his 1790 work Critique
of Judgment). His advocacy of ‘‘sapere aude!’’ (‘‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’’) pivots above all on ‘‘the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.’’
Kant’s division of the modern individual into a private subject and a public citizen
institutes a potentially schizophrenic split between the subject’s nonnegotiable private obedience to institutional demands and its equally nonnegotiable ‘‘freedom’’ and
‘‘civic duty’’ as a public ‘‘scholar [to] make use of reason before the entire literate
world’’ (Kant 1983: 42, 43). Kant’s affirmation of subjectivity as inherently autonomous and self-determined in its ‘‘public’’ sense presages the transcendental concept of
moral agency that he was to set forth a year later in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of
Morals (1785). Here the use of reason is not predicated on a dogmatic or metaphysical
assertion of independence. Rather, inasmuch as it is an object of ‘‘critique,’’ reason in
Kant at all times is to be understood as a complex developmental project. A first step
of philosophy’s agenda thus will be ‘‘to realize what has been involved all along in
thinking, judging and acting. [It is only] by realizing how much of the shape of our
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105
experience and action is ‘up to us,’ not ‘determined’ by what we find in the world or
by the passions or human nature, that the modern insistence on autonomy can be best
defended’’ (Pippin 1999: 49).
At the same time, Kant’s apparent conjunction of ‘‘public,’’ ‘‘scholar,’’ and ‘‘literate’’
also reveals the domain of rationality to be fundamentally comprised of disembodied
published writing as it operates within and steadily reinforces the modern definition
of the ‘‘public sphere’’ as that of an anonymous print culture. Yet the seemingly
recondite, because highly specialized, language associated with ‘‘expert systems’’
(Giddens) such as Kantian moral and political theory can be easily misconstrued.
For even as Kantian ‘‘scholars’’ remain obedient to the quotidian demands of political
and institutional authorities, their manner of conveying to the public rational
reflections as printed matter reveals ‘‘abstraction’’ to point less to the recondite
technicality of Kantian discourse than to its covert claim for universal authority.
Implicitly, Jürgen Habermas remarks, ‘‘the issues discussed became ‘general’ not
merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able
to participate’’ (Habermas 1994: 37).2 The subterranean universalism of Kant’s
critical philosophy is thus matched, in his political writings, by a hypothesis concerning the gradual dissemination of rational patterns throughout political and social
life. Such patterns – which, like the transcendental claims of Kant’s critical philosophy, remain equally beyond verification or falsification – are no longer driven by a
conscious intentionality but manifest themselves as a self-regulating, structural
movement or development. As Kant puts it, ‘‘what strikes us as complicated and
unpredictable in the single individual may in the history of the entire species be
discovered to be the steady progress and slow development of its original capacities’’
(‘‘Idea for a Universal History,’’ in Kant 1983: 29). This ‘‘structural transformation of
the public sphere’’ (to borrow Habermas’s titular phrase) as a dialectical progression
and development (with coemergent disciplines of demography and probability theory
as just two of its conceptual entailments) is particularly in evidence in the rise of
literacy, itself a sociological premise for Kant’s hint at ‘‘a strange, unexpected pattern
in human affairs’’ whereby the world of conceptual innovation and free, rational
exploration ‘‘gradually reacts on a people’s mentality (whereby they become increasingly able to act freely) and . . . finally even influences the principles of government’’
(‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ in Kant 1983: 46).3
Pivotal for any understanding of German Idealism is the notion of ‘‘autonomy,’’
which Kant defines as ‘‘the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every
rational nature’’ (Kant 1981: 41). Arguably, evidence for a truly self-determining,
autonomous agency can only be achieved ex negativo, that is, by excluding any
empirical objects or intentional objectives (outcomes, motives, desires, etc.) from
the moral evaluation of an action. ‘‘In every case where an object of the will must be
laid down as the foundation for prescribing a rule to determine the will, there the rule
is nothing but heteronomy. The imperative is then conditioned . . . [and] hence can
never command morally, i.e., categorically’’ (1981: 47). Having posited the modern
subject’s spontaneous (free), quasi-legislative authority over all empirical phenomena
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in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had also, at least implicitly, asserted the intrinsic
universality of his subject’s representations of phenomenal experience and the moral
good. Behind the formal austerity of the categorical imperative – that is, the demand
that the maxims informing a specific action must be imagined as valid principles for
universal legislation – lurks a radical, as it were ‘‘leveling,’’ theory of community.
Homologous with ‘‘reason’’ (Vernunft) itself, community serves both as the distant telos
to whose realization all individual practice (if it is to count as ‘‘moral’’) must be
committed and as the (seemingly present) source of legitimation for moral agency.
Kant’s reconceptualization of moral agency succinctly dramatizes how philosophy
itself establishes a new understanding of ‘‘modernity’’ around 1780 yet, in so doing,
also compels its new, ‘‘disembedded’’ subject to experience all the more acutely its
precarious situation. ‘‘Human life has become, in a collective sense, completely selfdetermining, but . . . in a way that is thereby completely contingent’’ (Pippin 1999:
35). In his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant acknowledges as much when,
in an aside often ignored by readers today, he expressly rejects the consideration of
happiness from his theory of moral agency: ‘‘The principle of one’s own happiness is
most objectionable,’’ not only because ‘‘experience contradicts the supposition that
well-being is always proportional to well-doing’’ but, more importantly, because ‘‘this
principle contributes nothing to the establishment of morality, inasmuch as making a
man happy is quite different from making him good’’ (Kant 1981: 46). To the
contingent and hence specious good of happiness, Kant opposes the ‘‘ontological
concept of perfection’’ as the rational principle of morality. It is a notion subsequently
amplified as the ‘‘postulates’’ (God, freedom, and immortality) in the Critique of
Practical Reason.
The production of the highest good in the world is the necessary object of a will
determinable by the moral law. But in such a will the complete conformity of dispositions
with the moral law is the supreme condition of the highest good. The conformity must
therefore be just as possible as its object is, since it is contained in the same command to
promote the object. Complete conformity of the will with the moral law is, however,
holiness, a perfection of which no rational being of the sensible world is capable at any
moment of his existence. Since it is nevertheless required as practically necessary, it can
only be found in an endless progress toward that complete conformity, and in accordance
with principles of pure practical reason it is necessary to assume such a practical progress
as the real object of our will. This endless progress is, however, possible only on the
presupposition of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing
endlessly (which is called the immortality of the soul). (Kant 1997: 102; see Pinkard
2002: 60-1).
Far from a metaphysical creed or dogma, Kant’s shrewd introduction of such a
postulate (‘‘a theoretical proposition . . . not demonstrable as such’’) reveals how finite
subjects must at all times construct those theoretical notions that will motivate and
direct them (in their capacity as moral agents) to advance and implement the
objective of reason. Postulates of ‘‘pure practical reason’’ thus seek to confer a certain
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107
measure of intuitive specificity on the underlying ontological idea of ‘‘perfection,’’
even as Kant readily concedes that the idea of ‘‘perfection’’ necessarily ‘‘presuppose[s]
the morality that it has to explain.’’ Still, man-made postulates such as perfection
remain preferable to a ‘‘divine concept’’ of the moral good, simply because ‘‘we cannot
intuit divine perfection’’ (Kant 1981: 64-7).4 By conceiving of ‘‘perfection’’ as the
highest, ‘‘ontological’’ objective of life, and through its autonomous ‘‘construction’’ in
the modality of ‘‘postulates,’’ individuals afford themselves a categorical (noncontingent) motive for positively aspiring (rather than incidentally conforming) to the
status of a disinterested moral agent. Kant’s transgenerational conception of reason
qua ‘‘immortality’’ thus exemplifies his overall position that moral agents must
construct such theoretical notions as will induce them, as empirical and necessarily
imperfect beings, to merge their contingent inclinations with the project of reason.
Probing the Grounds of Rationality: Self-consciousness as
Process in Fichte and Schelling
It is this position – mirrored by Kant’s insistence on the ‘‘communicability’’ of
aesthetic judgments in the Critique of Judgment – which throws into relief the
intrinsically developmental logic of Kantian thought and which, more than anything
else, shaped virtually every philosophical and literary project of the Romantic period.5
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) radicalizes above all Kant’s notion of reason as
autonomous and self-generating. Decisive for Fichte proved a dispute regarding the
legacy of Kant’s critical philosophy that unfolded in 1792. It featured, on one side,
Karl Leonard Reinhold, whose Elementarphilosophie sought to distil from Kant’s
Critiques a widely applicable philosophical method predicated on what Reinhold
called ‘‘the fact of consciousness.’’ On the other side, much to the surprise of Fichte
(then a committed Kantian), G. E. Schulze, a professor of philosophy at Helmstedt
(and writing under the pseudonym ‘‘Aenesidemus’’) developed an incisive critique not
only of Reinhold’s premises but, to a certain extent, also of Kant’s own system. Of the
entire Reinhold–Aenesidemus debate, which has received ample critical attention,
only one aspect can be taken up, and in so doing I follow Terry Pinkard’s succinct
account.6 G. E. Schulze exposed ‘‘a massive inconsistency in Reinhold’s account of
self-consciousness, since Reinhold required all consciousness to involve representations, and a self-conscious subject therefore had to have a representation of itself,
which, in turn, required a subject to relate the representation of the subject to itself,
which, in turn, implied an infinite regress’’ (Pinkard 2003: 106). So as to recover from
the apparent refutation not only of Reinhold’s ‘‘fact’’ of self-consciousness but, by
implication, the suddenly unsustainable distinction between conscious representations and things in themselves (noumena) at the very heart of Kant’s first Critique,
Fichte concedes that self-consciousness cannot be explained as a self-relation or
Kantian synthesis at all. Self-awareness cannot originate in reflection, and the self
can never be anchored in any reflexive comparison of the knowing subject with an
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objectified representation (Vorstellung) or image (Bild) that it has produced of ‘‘itself.’’
For to seek self-awareness and self-confirmation through ‘‘reflexive determinations’’
(Reflexionsbestimmungen) presupposes that the reflecting self can recognize the unity of
the knower (subject) and the known (self) and, moreover, that it is capable of
repossessing that very recognition as affirming its very own (and not someone else’s)
identity. In response to this impasse, as Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank have
shown, Fichte shifts the conception of self-knowledge from one of relation to one of
production, with ‘‘the act of production . . . taken to be a real activity, while the product
is taken to be the knowledge of this act.’’7
Fichte’s strictures on the scope and reach of reflection, which can never lay
foundations but only clarify appearances a posteriori, was to be significantly extended
and intensified by Novalis (Novalis 2003).8 Already Fichte’s performative model of
self-consciousness as the supposed center and circumference of all philosophical
knowledge encounters difficulties. Both the conversion of a subjective act of positing
(Tathandlung) into an actual knowledge of the product (consciousness) and the further
recognition of that product as identical with the producer’s ‘‘self’’ succumb to a
circular logic; for each step effectively presupposes that the original act of positing
be transparent unto itself. As Fichte puts it, ‘‘the self is to posit itself, not merely for
some intelligence outside it, but simply for itself; it is to posit itself as posited by
itself. Hence, as surely as it is a self, it must have the principle of life and consciousness solely within itself’’ (Fichte [1794] 1970: 241).9 As Helmut Müller-Sievers puts
it in his fine account of the ascendancy of ‘‘epigenetic’’ over ‘‘preformationist’’ models
of theory: ‘‘To the Kantian fallacy of a preformed I that can never get at its own origin
Fichte thus opposes the reciprocal structure of an intellectual intuition in which the
totality of the I is given while its constituent parts are still distinguishable’’ (MüllerSievers 1997: 68).10 And yet, even within the closed circuitry of Fichte’s Science of
Knowledge as one of autoproduction, the progressive determination of the ‘‘I’’ as self
still entails an element of difference. ‘‘Since in . . . reflection the self is not conscious of
itself, the reflection in question is a mere feeling’’ (Fichte 1970: 261).11 Even an
epigenetic ‘‘I’’ conceived as capable of generating from within itself the distinct
qualities of intuition and reflection, as well as its own knowledge of them, presupposes a certain awareness of its own unity by the positing ‘‘I’’ or, in Fichte’s words,
premises all ‘‘determination’’ (Bestimmung) on a certain ‘‘feeling of determinability’’
(Gefühl von Bestimmbarkeit). For the formal unity of the self’s performative selfgeneration must itself be mediated, that is, recognized and reclaimed by the resulting
subject as its own identity.
The identity of the Fichtean ‘‘I’’ – that is, the predication of the individual on an
absolute foundation, of contingent self-awareness on humanity as a shared condition
and destiny – requires that that ‘‘I’’ recognize the formal unity of its constitutive
materials (namely, intuition and concept) as the very foundation of its own being and
so recognize itself as part of the greater plot of rationality in its unfolding. It is this
experience of its own ‘‘determinability,’’ according to Fichte, which manifests itself at
first in affective form. That is, what philosophy calls an ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ attains
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109
phenomenal distinctness only in the subject’s ‘‘feeling’’ of its own potential determinability (Bestimmbarkeit). Novalis puts it most succinctly: ‘‘Philosophy is originally a
feeling.’’ Aside from having anchored the subject in an ‘‘immediate’’ and seemingly
indisputable ground – of transcendental function in Fichte’s system, though strikingly reminiscent of empiricist models of ‘‘sensation’’ – not much has been accomplished. For the ‘‘feeling’’ of determinability must itself once again be recognized by
the ‘‘I’’ as its own foundation or identity, and yet as Novalis so laconically remarks:
‘‘Feeling cannot feel itself’’ (1978, II: 18). It is a crucial, albeit to Fichte most
unwelcome, qualification, whereby ‘‘feeling’’ succumbs to the vagaries of representation, figurative expression, and interpretive contingency. Involuntarily, Fichte here
finds himself retracing Kant’s deduction from the first Critique (particularly the
pivotal chapter on the ‘‘transcendental schematism’’) and Kant’s later, more explicit
conception of ‘‘feeling’’ as a subjective universal in the realm of aesthetic production
and judgment.12 Thus Fichte admits that in order to ‘‘raise feeling to consciousness’’
the imagination must produce an ‘‘image’’ (Bild ) of that feeling, one whereby
consciousness would be enabled to recognize its immediate ‘‘feeling of determinability’’ in objective form and thus take hold of a knowledge that had previously
slumbered in the encrypted form of an ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ (Fichte 1964-, II, 3:
297). In anticipation of Schelling’s and Goethe’s conception of an Urbild, Fichte
stipulates that such an image must be produced by the subject’s imagination, a
claim that ensures the ascendancy of aesthetics over logic in the business of transcendental philosophy.
And yet once again the problem of reflective recognition intrudes. For what, other
than mere desire (which may afford consciousness transient pleasures, though surely
no coherent self), could possibly underwrite the objective authenticity of the image
that the imagination had produced? How could the self recognize the image as a
genuine representation of its own ‘‘feeling’’ of determinability? And how can an image
paradoxically charged with mediating this supposedly ‘‘immediate feeling of determinability’’ for the ‘‘I’’ (and thus promoting that ‘‘I’’ to outright self-awareness) be
recognized as having delivered proof rather than having contrived it? 13 Fichte’s own
reflections – carefully edited out from the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre – falter on just that
point as he worries: ‘‘the (productive) imagination itself is a faculty of the Self.
Couldn’t it be the only grounding faculty [Grundvermögen] of the Self?’’ (Fichte
1963-, II, 3: 298).14 Is the imagination a ‘‘faculty’’ of a rational, logically deducible
subjectivity, or does it merely figuratively conjure or project a self whose most abiding
characteristic it is to think of itself as firmly, rationally grounded? Mocking the
reasoning whereby ‘‘Ich and Geist are but the Christian and Sirname [sic] of his weak
Iness [sic], J. G. Fichte,’’ Coleridge was to remark sometime after 1815 that Fichte’s
had not shown his notion of immediacy (or feeling) ‘‘to be more comprehensible than
the Anschauung, & the precious mechanis[m] of Selbstbewusstsein substituted for it.’’ As
he sums up his case, ‘‘how could Fichte have made these abstractions of Reason,
Feeling, intuitive space, but from some absolute Entity? And what entitled him to
abstract?’’ Admittedly, though, Coleridge’s qualms about Fichte’s theory pertain not
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so much to ‘‘the doctrine, as to the Chasms in the Proof of it,’’ and the latter would
appear endemic to all talk of self-consciousness (Coleridge 1980, II: 610-11, 607).
Ever the ‘‘notorious and inveterate foundationalist,’’ as Daniel Breazeale puts it,
Fichte would continue to argue that the ultimate ground capable of comprising and
uniting intuition and concept, content and form, substance and accident in one
subjective identity is to be located in what he calls ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ (Breazeale
2000: 186). This problematic aspect of Fichte’s Idealism has recently received much
attention. Terry Pinkard convincingly shows how Fichte’s notion of ‘‘intellectual
intuition’’ effectively concedes the unavailability of objective ‘‘ground’’ for the self.
Yet, in following Robert Brandom’s influential arguments, Terry Pinkard also suggests that the seemingly indemonstrable, even mythical, nature of an ‘‘intellectual
intuiti’’ need not necessarily be read as Fichte conceding defeat. Rather, with this term
the Science of Knowledge advances not so much epistemological, let alone ontological
claims for the self’s ‘‘truth’’ as it merely asserts the self’s ‘‘normative status’’ and
effectively collapses rationality into normativity. As Pinkard puts it, ‘‘one cannot give
a causal, or, for that matter, any other non-normative explanation of the subject’s basic
normative act of attributing entitlement to itself and to other propositions.’’ And yet,
any normative act derives its authority from the possibility of its contestation. Hence,
the initial positing of the ‘‘I’’ by itself must simultaneously provide for the possibility
of ‘‘incorrectness’’ vis-à-vis the normative ‘‘self’’ so posited. That is, implicit in a
reading of Fichtean ‘‘positing’’ as the establishment of a ‘‘norm’’ is the possibility of
that norm’s negation by something else. Acknowledging as much, Fichte calls that
something else the ‘‘non-I’’ (nicht-Ich), though he also hastens to restrict this ‘‘non-I’’
to the purely formal-logical status of an external ‘‘check’’ (Anstoß). Even such a
minimalist conception of the ‘‘non-I,’’ however, entangles Fichte in the logical
contradiction of an ‘‘I’’ claiming rational authority and normative status for itself
while simultaneously positing ‘‘some things as not having their normative status
posited by the ‘‘I’’ (Pinkard 2002: 114-15; see also Brandom 1994: 3-55).
Fichte’s logically inconsistent (dis)qualification of Nature as mere ‘‘non-I’’ – an
unorganized and irrational externality – prompted F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) to
embark on a different course. The objective was not so much to reject Fichte’s entire
system, to which Schelling had responded quite positively in his early publications
between 1794 and 97, as it was to expand the dynamic conception of the Fichtean
subject into the seemingly inert and ‘‘other’’ sphere of nature (see Frank 1985: 2371).15 In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling fundamentally seeks to disarm the logical
tension between an ‘‘I’’ making normative claims for itself and, at the same time,
attributing nonnormative and, by implication, irrational status to its Other, Nature.
For Schelling, the objective became to discover within the realm of nature the same
developmental model that had enabled the subject of the Science of Knowledge to attain
progressively greater explicitness as a Self by means of what Fichte had called
‘‘reflexive determinations’’ (Reflexionsbestimmungen). As the principal means of philosophical practice, reflection could not content itself with thinking nature in merely
formal terms, that is, as the inessential Other against and by means of which the self
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posits itself. To be sure, Schelling remarks in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), ‘‘as
soon as man sets himself in opposition to the external world . . . reflection first begins;
he separates from now on what Nature had always united. . . . But this separation is
only means, not end.’’ Any philosophy that unsettles the ‘‘equilibrium of forces and of
consciousness’’ by a free act of conscious reflection will also have to re-establish this
equilibrium in the end; for ‘‘mere reflection . . . is a spiritual sickness in mankind’’
(Schelling 1988: 10-11). The only way to remedy the very split between self and other
whereby philosophy itself became possible is to locate the same spontaneous and free
developmental trajectory that characterizes human intelligence within the seemingly
separate domain of nature. As Schelling was to summarize it in his System of
Transcendental Idealism (1800), ‘‘intelligence will be able to intuit itself only in an
object that has an internal principle of motion [Bewegung] within itself. . . . Hence the
intelligence must intuit itself . . . as a living organization. But now it appears from
this very deduction of life, that the latter must be common to all organic nature, and
hence that there can be no distinction between living and nonliving organizations in
nature itself’’ (Schelling 1978: 124).
Arguably, Schelling’s initial attempts at constructing nature as the three-dimensional expression of an inherently dynamic intelligence in his 1797 Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature ran afoul of the empirical approaches favored by the scientific
community of his time. Only two years later, however, Schelling returned with a more
rigorous systematic formulation of what Dieter Sturma has called ‘‘the idea of a
genetic isomorphism of nature and spirit,’’ an idea that also proves strikingly
prescient of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian thought (Sturma 2000: 225). Beyond its
prescience of the kind of evolutionary thinking that was to dominate much of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century theory, Schelling’s First Draft Toward a Systematic
Philosophy of Nature (Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie) of 1799 also
merits our attention because its conceptions of ‘‘movement’’ and ‘‘development’’
(Bewegung and Entwicklung) stand in particularly instructive contrast to Hegel’s
model in Part 2 of his 1817 Encyclopedia. For Schelling, it would be impossible to
think of nature as an unconditional ‘‘being’’ (Seyn) ‘‘unless we could discover within
the very concept of being the hidden trace of freedom. . . . Looked upon from a higher
viewpoint, this being itself is nothing but nature’s continual activity as it has
congealed in its product.’’ Schelling adamantly opposes any ‘‘primitive’’ reifying
view of nature: ‘‘everything in nature must be understood as something that has
become [ein Gewordenes].’’ The key question, then, becomes why an infinitely active
nature should ever assume a particular material Gestalt. Given that, as Schelling puts
it, ‘‘nature abhors all individuality and strives continually toward the absolute,’’ the
explanation for why we are nonetheless presented with definite and necessarily
inadequate material entities has to be sought in the same logic of ‘‘development’’
(Entwicklung) that allows us to think of nature as ‘‘evolution’’ (Evolution) (Erster
Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, in Schelling 1982: 13, 33).
Schelling’s argument here strikingly prefigures Richard Dawkins’s reinterpretation
of Darwin’s theory of survival, according to which the individual being’s preoccupation
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with its own survival is not driven by a desire to preserve its body but, rather, by a need
for transmitting the genetic information contained in the body – a plot of which the
individual organism, even a human one, need not be conscious at all (Dawkins 1989:
12-45). Thus Schelling remarks that the ‘‘metamorphoses through which various kinds
of insects pass are almost exclusively determined by the development of their gendered
individuality [Geschlecht].’’ Once a definite gender and sexual maturity has been
attained, ‘‘the metamorphoses cease,’’ and it appears that the butterfly, having evolved
beyond its larval stages, ‘‘seems to have assumed this ultimate developmental stage
solely for the purpose of propagating its species.’’ Schelling’s speculative concept of
development thus accords individual entities and their morphological Gestalt only an
instrumental, quasi-transitional role in a much larger evolutionary plot whose rationality we must ultimately locate in its continuous prolongation, an objective that can
only be realized if there is something to transmit. Like the Bildungsroman – one may
think of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship or his ironic subversion of didactic
poetry in the ‘‘Metamorphosis of the Plants’’ – nature individualizes itself solely because
it is only ‘‘at the peak of individuation that sexual maturity will be attained,’’ which in
turn ensures the prolongation of the process of rational organization that defines the
totality of nature (Entwurf, in Schelling 1882: 45, 48n, 49n). As it ‘‘advances the
development of individual forms, nature is by no means concerned with the individual
– on the contrary, it aims at the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the individual.’’ For as soon
as ‘‘the common objective [das Gemeinschaftliche] has been secured, nature will abandon
the individual, . . . indeed will proceed to treat it as an impediment [Schranke] of its
activity, one that it works to destroy. For the individual must appear as the means, and
the species as the end of nature’’ (ibid.: 50n, 51). Schelling proceeds to analyze how
every developmental stage, as it manifests itself in the definitive Gestalt of a given
organism, is but a ‘‘phenomenon’’ of a logical process consumed with its own continuity
and coherence. Long before Darwin, Schelling also remarks on how the ‘‘developmental
drive’’ (Bildungstrieb) is in principle absolutely free but, in fact, is constrained and given
direction by ‘‘external conditions.’’ Only through the latter does a given organism’s
internal ‘‘embryonic disposition’’ (Keim oder Anlage) acquire a sense of developmental
direction and purpose. With this explanation for ‘‘why each organism can only ever
reproduce itself ad infinitum’’ – that is, due to some ‘‘primordial restriction imposed
[by external contingency] on its developmental drive’’ – there is no further justification
for metaphysical or theological conceptions of nature as ‘‘preformation. . . . For the
entire diversity of organisms and [their] component parts reveals nothing but the
manifold directions in which the developmental drive is constrained to express itself at
any given stage of development.’’ For Schelling as for Goethe, with whom he was in
close contact between 1799 and 1803, all formation [Bildung] thus occurs through
epigenesis (that is, through metamorphosis or dynamic evolution)’’ (ibid.: 54n, 56, 601).16 The concept of ‘‘development’’ has now evolved from a characteristic of the
Enlightenment individual’s rational and spontaneous self-determination to the simultaneously historical and systematic organization of all being.17
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113
Negotiating Difference: Reason, Modernity, and Pragmatism in
Hegel
As early as his long 1797 review essay of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, Schelling had
begun to develop a protodialectical conception of philosophy that instituted a
reflexive divide between ‘‘consciousness’’ and ‘‘spirit.’’ As he puts it:
every act of the soul is also a determinate stage of the soul. . . . Thus, through its own
products – imperceptible to the common eye, [yet] clear and distinct to that of the
philosopher – the soul marks the path on which it gradually reaches self-consciousness.
The external world lies unfolded before us, so that we may rediscover within it the
history of our spirit. (‘‘Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,’’ in
Schelling 1994: 90)
Yet to read Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as introducing ‘‘a ‘pre-history’ of reason’’
(Sturma 2000: 218; see also Frank 1985: 97-107) into German philosophy also
demands clarification of some fundamental philosophical issues on which Schelling’s
later philosophy was to differ emphatically from that of Hegel. It was left to Hegel to
develop a comprehensive systematic account of the transforming relation between
mere ‘‘opining’’ (Meinen) – that is, the discriminations ventured by our ‘‘natural
consciousness’’ or ‘‘understanding’’ (Verstand) – and a fully socialized rationality
(Vernunft) defining of philosophical ‘‘spirit’’ (Geist) proper. Already in his seminal
1801 Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Hegel offers the
following, programmatic qualification of a philosophy that remains entirely confined
within the domain of the understanding and, on that basis, argues for the necessary
and irremediable discontinuity between our forever partial, rational engagement of
the phenomenal world and the forever ineluctable domain of the noumenal:
The intellect, as the capacity to set limits, erects a building and places it between man
and the Absolute, linking everything that man thinks worthy and holy to this building,
fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding it ad infinitum.
The entire totality of limitations is to be found in it, but not the Absolute itself. [The
latter] is lost in the parts, where it drives the intellect in its ceaseless development of
manifoldness. But in its striving to enlarge itself into the Absolute, the intellect only
reproduces itself ad infinitum and so mocks itself. Reason reaches the Absolute only in
stepping out of this manifold of parts. The more stable and splendid the edifice of the
intellect is, the more restless becomes the striving of life that is caught up in it as a part
to get out of it, and raise itself to freedom. (Hegel 1977a: 89-90)
Presaging the critique of Enlightenment thought later undertaken by Nietzsche,
Freud, and Adorno, Hegel pointedly comments on the ‘‘restlessness’’ of a ‘‘life’’
confined within the understanding’s fragmented representation of being held and
associated primarily with Kant’s critical philosophy and its subjectivist extension in
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Thomas Pfau
Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. By the time of the Phenomenology – itself the crucial
transitional work in Hegel’s oeuvre – the question as to how to grasp the meaning of
the ‘‘absolute’’ is posed in markedly different ways than in his earlier writings. No
longer does the ‘‘absolute’’ denote a merely negative void (as was the case in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason) inaccessible to the understanding’s forever reactive, partial, and
merely accumulative representations of being as the other of the thinking subject.
Rather, the ‘‘absolute’’ comes to encompass the entire logic of successive paradigms of
knowledge of which the individual subject can never be fully cognizant. As the
‘‘Preface’’ to the Phenomenology famously puts it:
The Truth is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating
itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially
the result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists
its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. (Hegel
1977b: 11)
In developing this gnomic pronouncement, Hegel’s Phenomenology rearticulates what
Schelling had first claimed vis-à-vis Fichte and Kant, namely, that the principal tool
of the understanding, the ‘‘concept’’ (Begriff ) stands not in radical separation from
being (Sein) but is fundamentally on a continuum with being inasmuch as the latter
has to be thought as forever developing. Hegel thus redefines philosophy’s overall selfconception by insisting on the necessary ‘‘incompleteness’’ of the kind of conception of
the world held by the understanding at a given point in historical time. Doing so
allows Hegel to move beyond Kant’s dualist (in its origins Gnostic) assertion of a
categorical ‘‘incompatibility’’ between the noumenal (nonintuitable) totality of Reason and the understanding’s contingent perspective (Vorstellung) on the phenomenal
world (Pippin 1991b: 533).18 Inasmuch as the concept can only ever furnish partial
knowledge of ‘‘actuality’’ (Wirklichkeit) and remains susceptible to error, it must not
be mistaken as a static implement, to be indifferently applied to a putatively separate
realm of phenomena (‘‘nature’’). The challenge or, in Hegel’s Protestant work ethic,
the ‘‘labor’’ (Arbeit) of philosophy thus ‘‘consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension . . . but rather in just its opposite,
in freeing determinate thoughts (Gedanken) from their fixity. . . . [For] fixed thoughts
have the ‘I’, the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance and element
of their existence.’’ To tease the developmental logic, the intrinsic ‘‘dynamism’’
(Bewegung) out of thought is the great task of speculative dialectics:
Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking . . . recognizes itself as a moment, or when
the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself – not by leaving itself out, or setting itself
aside, but by giving up the fixity of its self-positing. . . . Through this movement the
pure thoughts become Notions (Begriffe), and are only now what they are in truth, selfmovements (Selbstbewegungen), circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance
is. (Hegel 1977b: 19-20; see also Hegel 1952: 30-1)
Rationality and Development in German Idealism
115
What is here being said of an individual’s cognitive relationship toward being also
holds true of more complex systems of thought, including those put forward by Kant,
Fichte, and also Schelling. The autonomous and spontaneous selves developed by
these two thinkers, ‘‘critical’’ articulations of Enlightenment subjectivity, Hegel
insists, must themselves be reflexively understood and absorbed as mere ‘‘moments’’
into a dynamic process of intellectual development (Bildung). Hegel thus aims not to
refute but, rather, to sublate (aufheben) Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies from their
initial status as doxa or ‘‘opinion’’ (Meinung) to their truthful position within the
developmental economy of philosophy as a ‘‘system.’’ For however theoretically
circumspect, Enlightenment rationality had always unfolded as a form of an ‘‘opinion’’
and thus necessarily had ‘‘fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity.’’ Hence, for
Hegel, it could never actually ‘‘comprehend the diversity [Verschiedenheit] of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in them simple
contradictions [Widerspruch]’’ (Hegel 1977b: 2, translation modified; see also Hegel
1952: 10). In what amounts to a categorical break with Kant’s and Fichte’s premise of
a radical discontinuity between subjective rationality and the realm of the noumenal
or Being (Sein), Hegel premises his own correction of the Enlightenment project on a
fundamentally new understanding of ‘‘difference.’’ For Hegel, the logical category of
‘‘difference’’ no longer operates disjunctively – by positing an ontological incompatibility between two kinds of being. For to deploy it in that manner necessarily (and
dogmatically) posits a realm of being supposedly independent of any specific subjective viewpoint and the discursive networks through which discrete viewpoints
must continually be negotiated. With ‘‘substance’’ no longer operating as a foundational philosophical category in Hegel’s system, ‘‘difference’’ – like time itself – now
serves to organize different conceptual models or viewpoints into a succession. As Hegel
puts it in the Logic, in observing that two things differ in some specific respect we
institute ‘‘difference’’ (Unterschied) as a matter ‘‘of reflection, not [as] the otherness of
determinate being.’’ Whatever otherness an intelligence notices is ‘‘the otherness of an
essence’’ (das Andere des Wesens) and not ‘‘the other as other of an other, existing outside
it’’ (Hegel 1969: 417, translation modified; Hegel 1986, II: 46). In this manner,
‘‘difference’’ is repositioned as a key term within a narrative that progressively
unmasks each instance of object-perception (Wahrnehmung) as but a transitional
‘‘normative’’ position taken up by one agent and entered, with varying degrees of
success, into social, intersubjective circulation. Rather than dissociating discrete
entities, ‘‘difference’’ in Hegel organizes relations over time by articulating the ‘‘diversity’’ (Verschiedenheit) of intellectual states and conceptual models (including the
earlier, disjunctive paradigm of Enlightenment rationality) as a logical and historical
sequence.
Hence Hegelian reflection repositions Kant’s distinction between the noumenal
and phenomenal as a particular ‘‘moment’’ in the trajectory of rationality to full
awareness of its freedom, which will ultimately lead it to recognize that distinction as
one that was not found (any more than objects are ‘‘found’’) but made. Hegel bluntly
applies this position to his discussion of nature in the Encyclopedia: ‘‘Nature’s essential
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Thomas Pfau
and distinctive characteristic is to be the Idea in the form of otherness [die Idee in ihrem
Anderssein]’’ (Hegel 1970: 15). As Terry Pinkard puts it, ‘‘in showing that the
normative demands made by ‘consciousness’ (that is, the norms governing judgments
about objects of which we are aware), we are driven to comprehend that our mode of
taking them to be such-and-such plays just as important a role in the cognitive
enterprise as do the objects themselves or our so-called direct awareness of them’’
(Pinkard 2002: 225). Hegel thus unmasks various epistemological stances, including
the category of ‘‘perception,’’ as covertly creating its ‘‘object’’ in the very act of
venturing specific normative assertions about it. The act of ‘‘perception’’ (Wahr/
nehmung; literally, ‘‘a taking-for-truth’’) thus surreptitiously constructs an object by
venturing certain predicates ‘‘about’’ it, predicates that reflection will eventually come
to reinterpret as norms for an intersubjective understanding. For in the end, ‘‘there is
no ‘outside’ or extra-conceptual explicans [but] . . . only what we have come to regard as
an indispensable explicans, and the narrative (i.e., Hegel’s Phenomenology) we need to
give concerns that ‘coming to regard’ ’’ (Pippin 1999: 72).19 It is in ‘‘self-consciousness’’ that the subject has progressed from a critical employment of the concept to a
putatively other perceptual object to a reflexive ‘‘dismantling’’ (Auseinanderlegung) of
the concept itself. To do so, however, is to shift one’s intellectual concern from the
intended ‘‘correspondence’’ between the concept and the object to an explication of the
concept for another self-conscious being. As Hegel dramatizes in a series of stages, any
theory of self-consciousness is implicitly a theory of intersubjectivity. Whereas in
perception ‘‘consciousness is to itself the truth,’’ self-consciousness now recognizes the
‘‘singleness . . . [and] empty inner being of the Understanding . . . [to be] no longer essences
but moments of self-consciousness.’’ The critical, reflexive distancing vis-à-vis the
concept as a mere tool of the understanding produces a self-conscious subject and
simultaneously casts its emergence as ‘‘essentially the return from otherness [Anderssein].’’
In its very mode of being, then, Hegelian self-consciousness ‘‘is movement’’
(Bewegung) and ‘‘life,’’ a paradigmatic shift from the inertia of merely perceiving
consciousness that also explains why a number of readers have interpreted the
Phenomenology as a developmental narrative or Bildungsroman. The formerly heteronomous ‘‘object’’ of perception, which is the negation of self-consciousness, ‘‘through
this reflection into itself . . . has become life.’’ Through a series of further reflexive
steps, self-conscious subjectivity ultimately recognizes that a truly corresponding
point of reference for its cognitive striving can ultimately only be found in another,
equally self-aware being: ‘‘Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another
self-consciousness. . . . Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does
the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it’’ (Hegel 1977b: 104-5, 106,
110).20 As Terry Pinkard summarizes this crucial transition: ‘‘Hegel’s resolution of
the Kantian paradox was to see it in social terms. Since the agent cannot secure any
bindingness for the principle simply on his own, he requires the recognition of another
agent of it as binding on both of them’’ (Pinkard 2002: 227).21 As Jean Hyppolite had
noted long before, ‘‘the condition of self-consciousness is the existence of other self-
Rationality and Development in German Idealism
117
consciousnesses.’’ Only ‘‘this mutual recognition, in which individuals recognize each
other as reciprocally recognizing each other, creates the element of spiritual life’’
(Hyppolite 1974: 163, 166). The quasi-contractual logic that begins to permeate
Hegel’s argument with the section on ‘‘self-consciousness’’ also hints why Hegel was
the only German Idealist to develop a comprehensive theory of language, and some
closing reflections on the relation between dialectic movement and linguistic form are
in order.
What the Phenomenology calls ‘‘spirit’’ is in the end precisely this ongoing, intersubjective negotiating of those norms or ‘‘notions’’ (Begriffe) that are to be taken as the
binding, communal ‘‘reality.’’ Much has been said about the organizational peculiarities of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its uneasy fusion of systematic and historical claims.
Part BB, entitled ‘‘Spirit’’ thus effectively makes up the entire second half of the book
as Hegel dialectically configures the three phases of the spirit – spirit in its immediacy, in alienation from itself, and as self-certainty – with the three historical stages
of classical antiquity, feudal modernity up to the French Revolution, and the modern
secular state since Napoleon. Each of the many transitions that comprise this historical part of Hegel’s Phenomenology occurs when a community of subjects, having
posited a coherent view of their world, reflexively understand this view to have
been a discursive construct and hence open to dynamic change. In arriving at a
reflexive understanding of their own opinions as intrinsically linguistic, formal
constructs – that is, as expressions of their own, intellectual ‘‘freedom’’ rather than
as facsimiles of being – the subjects of a discursive community also begin to perceive a
deep-structural connection between the ‘‘expression’’ (Äußerung) and the eventual
‘‘jettisoning’’ (Entäusserung) of their specific worldview. This recognition, in turn,
produces their ‘‘alienation’’ (Entfremdung) from previous opinion, which is now repositioned as but a moment in the simultaneously logical and historical development of a
metasubjective ‘‘spirit.’’
For an example, one may turn to the struggle between the ‘‘noble consciousness’’
and an emergent theory of the modern state, as it is charted in the section on ‘‘SelfAlienated Spirit: Culture [Bildung]’’ of the Phenomenology. Hegel there shows how for
the noble representative of a civic-humanist order the function of language exclusively
inheres in ‘‘law and command, and in the actual world, in counsel only [and thus] has the
essence for its content.’’ Yet precipitated by other emergent social and intellectual
formations (i.e., the rising professional, middle classes and their commitment to a
more abstract and egalitarian idea of civitas), the ‘‘noble consciousness’’ of the feudal
subject is constrained to adopt new forms of self-legitimation, which in turn impels it
to reflect upon and thus distance itself from the paradigm of the noble individual.
Characteristic of the latter was above all the aristocratic habitus of authoritative
‘‘speech [whereby] the pure self . . . qua independent, separate individuality comes into
existence, so that it exists for others.’’ Yet precisely this form is also its limitations,
since it lacks the permanence and, seen as a medium, lacks universality inasmuch as
all speech is local, occasional, and ephemeral; for ‘‘that it is perceived or heard means
that its real existence dies away [verhallt]’’ (Hegel 1977b: 308-9, 1952: 362-3).22 With
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Thomas Pfau
its claim that ‘‘alienation takes solely place in language,’’ Hegel’s phenomenological
analysis of spirit as its own history thus posits language as the very catalyst for the
reflexive movement that is history. In its three dimensions – a) as the form of a
specific content; b) as the reflexive content of that very form; and c) as a semiotic
medium connecting and reconciling these two positions – language constitutes
the very infrastructure of Hegelian reflection. As the very ‘‘medium of reflection’’
(Reflexionsmedium), to borrow Walter Benjamin’s expression, language serves as the
very circuitry of a systemic (i.e., no longer subjective) model of ‘‘intelligence.’’ Indeed,
as close readings of the second half of the Phenomenology, part III of the Encyclopedia, or
all of Hegel’s Aesthetics richly confirm, language is homologous with rationality itself,
something that in the late work of Hegel presents itself as a dynamic and selfregulating structure of progressive and increasing complexity. Hegel’s philosophy
thus closely mirrors or presages a number of discursive and intellectual formations
arising either simultaneously with it or following later in the twentieth century, such
as the rise of the developmental novel (Bildungsroman), the rise of structuralist (rather
than agency-driven) models of social description, and above all the ‘‘linguistic turn’’ of
philosophy typically said to have begun with Wittgenstein and Heidegger and widely
credited with having profoundly reconfigured the relationship between aesthetics,
literary studies, historical inquiry, and philosophy.
Notes
1 Especially poignant instances of the abstract
category of space superseding the local and
contingent meaning of place would be the
capitalization of land as ‘‘real estate’’ via parliamentary acts of enclosure in England or the
sweeping geographic and legal reorganization
of Germany under the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 and the subsequent introduction of uniform law (the Code Napoléon). See
Sheehan (1989: 14-40, 235-73); see also Nipperdey (1996: 11-68).
2 Giddens notes that ‘‘notions coined in the
meta-languages of the social sciences routinely
re-enter the universe of actions they were initially formulated to describe or account for.’’
As he puts it, ‘‘Modernity is itself deeply and
intrinsically sociological’’ (Giddens 1990: 15,
43).
3 Evidence of the accelerating rate of literacy can
be found in the number of new titles on display at the Leipzig book fair: 960 in 1700,
2,600 in 1780, and over 5,000 in 1800. See
Sheehan (1989: 153) and Pinkard (2002: 7).
Likewise, German as a vernacular rapidly displaces Latin as the official language of scholarship during the eighteenth century, with the
ratio of Latin to German publications dropping from 1:2 in 1700 to 1:10 in 1780; still,
advanced literacy lags significantly behind
England and France; see Engelsing (in Sheehan
1989: 157), who estimates that no more than
5 percent of Germans around 1780 possessed a
high level of literacy.
4 On the relation of Kantian ‘‘morality’’ to institutional, organized religion, see Pinkard’s
(2002) splendid survey of German Philosophy:
1760-1860, pp. 58-65.
5 For a close and sustained reading of Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, see Rodolphe Gasché
(2003) The Idea of Form, especially pp. 42-59.
6 On this debate, see Beiser (1987: 226-84),
Pinkard (2002: 105-8), and the essays by A.
von Schönborn and Michael Baur in Baur and
Dahlstrom (1999); see also Breazeale (1996)
and Cassirer (1974). Fichte’s review of ‘‘Aenesidemus’’ can be found in Fichte (1988).
Rationality and Development in German Idealism
7
8
9
10
11
12
Notwithstanding Fichte’s eagerness to escape
the aporias of reflection in his quest for autonomous self-constitution free of all presuppositions, ‘‘elements of the reflection theory
are . . . insinuating themselves into Fichte’s
counter-proposal. [Thus . . . ] we do not yet
see how we can use the productive act’s encounter with itself to make this knowledge
intelligible’’ (Henrich 1982: 26).
On Novalis’s remarkably perceptive critique
of Fichte in the six groups of manuscripts
that make up the Fichte Studies, see Von Molnar (1987: 39-43) and Bowie (1997: 65-80).
William O’Brien reads the Fichte Studies as
the ‘‘decisive point . . . at which Romanticism
turns away from Idealistic philosophy, or
more precisely, turns back upon it in order
to analyze it as language, and ultimately, as a
fiction’’ (O’Brien 1995: 78).
Characteristically, Novalis will rewrite that
Fichtean sentence as ‘‘The self must posit
itself as actively presenting’’ (Das Ich muß
sich, als darstellend setzen; Novalis 1978, II:
194), with the emphasis now placed on the
temporalized, progressive, and intrinsically
aesthetic nature of ‘‘positing.’’
Notwithstanding his fundamental departure
from Fichte’s system, Novalis and all early
Romantics share the epigenetic premise:
‘‘How can a person have a sense of something
if he does not have the germ of it within
himself. What I am to understand must develop organically within me – and what I
seem to learn is only nourishment – stimulation of the organism’’ (Novalis 1999: 25).
Even more clearly, the Fichte Studies comment
on the logic of origination: ‘‘Origination asserts a self-engendering, a causality that is its
own cause’’ (Entstehen drückt eine Selbsthervorbringung, eine Causalität, die sich selbst Causalität ist . . . aus; Novalis 1978, II, 208).
On this problem in Fichte’s early Science of
Knowledge, see Müller-Sievers (1997: 65-89).
William O’Brien’s study offers the most extensive account of Novalis’s linguistic theory
(O’Brien 1995: 77-118), though he appears
unaware of the structural affinity between
Novalis’s semiotic speculations and his critique of Idealist models of reflection as ordo
inversus. The latter concept figures more
13
14
15
16
17
119
prominently in Winfried Menninghaus’s
reading of Romantic theories of reflection
and representation (Menninghaus 1987: 7498); see also Gasché (1986: 23-54).
Ulrich Pothast remarks that Fichte’s theory
‘‘constructs the ‘I’ as one that knows itself, to
be sure, though only at the expense of its
internal consistency. The theory succeeds inasmuch as it shows that without the premise
of certain paradoxes, i.e., incompatible situations, no ‘I’ deserving of that name could
ever be constructed. Fichte’s theory may be
characterized as a self-consciously paradoxical
one’’ (Pothast 1971: 44, my translation).
Though he makes no mention of Fichte’s
‘‘Über Geist und Buchstaben in der Philosophie,’’ a crucial intertext for any discussion of
semiotics and linguistic theory relative to the
Wissenschaftslehre, William O’Brien rightly
notes how Fichte, ‘‘who took the step [towards semiotics] first, had also recoiled from
it’’ (O’Brien 1995: 101).
Frank also acknowledges Hölderlin’s significant contribution to Schelling’s critique of
Fichte. Of particular significance here are
Hölderlin’s letters to Schelling and his early
essays, especially ‘‘Judgment and Being.’’ See
Hölderlin (1987: 37-8 and 124-6 [letter to
Hegel]). On Schelling’s early writings, see
Bowie (1994: 12-29) and Cassirer (1974,
III: 217-84).
In his autobiographical miscellany, Tag- und
Jahreshefte, Goethe recalls reading Schelling’s
Entwurf around 1800 (Goethe 1981, X: 450).
Goethe’s famous didactic poems, Metamorphosis of the Plants and Metamorphosis of the
Animals fall in the same period, roughly
June 1798, though the latter poem remained
fragmentary and did not attain its eventual
form until 1806. See Goethe (1981, I: 199203); see also Goethe’s occasional poem,
‘‘Weltseele,’’ eponymous with Schelling’s
1799 treatise (Goethe 1981, I: 248).
Hegel’s ‘‘Philosophy of Nature,’’ which forms
Part II of the 1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, most cogently challenges
Schelling’s construction of nature as a separate developmental structure, ostensibly running parallel to the development of human
intelligence, and recognizable for the latter
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Thomas Pfau
qua ‘‘intuition.’’ As Hegel puts it, ‘‘in the
Philosophy of Nature, people have fallen
back on intuition (Anschauung) and set it
above reflective thought; but this is a mistake, for one cannot philosophize out of intuition. What is intuited must also be
thought’’ (Hegel 1970: 12). Schelling in
turn responded with an incisive critique of
Hegel’s conception of Being (Sein) in his
1827 Lectures on Modern Philosophy, charging
that for Hegel ‘‘being’’ as the ‘‘starting point’’
of all philosophical reflection is held to something ‘‘strictly negative, deficient, an emptiness’’ (ein bloßes Minus, als ein Mangel, eine
Leere) which, paradoxically, is nonetheless
‘‘to be overcome and filled with content’’ by
the autotelic process of thought (Schelling
1976: 419). On Schelling’s critique of
Hegel, see Manfred Frank’s excellent Der
unendliche Mangel an Seyn (1975: 32-119).
18 Pippin quickly inflects this ultimately crude
view of Kantian dualism, particularly as regards Kant’s conception of moral agency; see
Pippin (1991b: 537-41).
19 See also Martin Heidegger (Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes). Heidegger had already emphasized Hegel’s unmasking of ‘‘perception’’
(Wahr/nehmen; literally, ‘‘a taking-for-truth’’)
as part of the overall project of a ‘‘Science of
the Experience of Consciousness’’ – that being
the original title for the Phenomenology.
20 On different, often radically incompatible
readings of the Phenomenology, see the opening
of Pippin (1993).
21 Pinkard here summarizes his earlier, expansive and thorough reinterpretation offered in
Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason
(Pinkard 1994).
22 See also §§ 440-64 of the Encyclopedia, where
Hegel further develops his linguistic theory;
see Hegel (1978: 78-217). The most expansive meditation on the dynamic relationship
between ‘‘spirit and letter’’ (Geist and Buchstabe) is arguably offered in Hegel’s Aesthetics.
On Hegel’s linguistic theory, see Derrida
(1980) and Smith (1988).
References and Further Reading
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1972).
Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming.
New York: Continuum.
Baur, Michael (1999). ‘‘The role of skepticism in
the emergence of German idealism.’’ In
Michael Baur and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (eds.),
The Emergence of German Idealism. Washington:
Catholic University of America Press,
pp. 63-91.
Beiser, Frederick C. (1987). The Fate of Reason:
German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blumenberg, Hans (1983). The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bowie, Andrew (1994). Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Bowie, Andrew (1997). From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary
Theory. London and New York: Routledge.
Brandom, Robert (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Breazeale, Daniel (1996). ‘‘The Theory of Practice
and the Practice of Theory: Fichte and the ‘Primacy of Practical Reason.’ ’’ International Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1): 47-64.
Breazeale, Daniel (2000). ‘‘The Spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre.’’ In Sally Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171-98.
Cassirer, Ernst ([1920] 1974). Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der
Neueren Zeit. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Cassirer, Ernst (1981). Kant’s Life and Thought,
trans. James Hayden. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1980). Marginalia, ed.
George Whalley and H. J. Jackson, 5 vols.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rationality and Development in German Idealism
Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1980). ‘‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.’’ In
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, pp. 69-108.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1964-). Werke, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob. Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb ([1794] 1970). Science of
Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1987). The Vocation of
Man, trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1988). Fichte: Early
Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Frank, Manfred (1975). Der unendliche Mangel an
Seyn: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der
Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Frank, Manfred (1985). Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Frank, Manfred (1989). Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Gasché, Rodolphe (1986). The Tain of the Mirror:
Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe (2003). The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1981). Werke, ed.
Erich Trunz. Munich: Beck.
Habermas, Jürgen (1994). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1952). Phänomenologie des Geistes,
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7
German Romantic Fiction
Roger Paulin
The Romantic Novel
Is it open-ended?
The German Romantic novel seems to have no sense of an ending. Too often
(exceptions are rare) it breaks off, it fragments, it dissolves into discursiveness, it
abandons linearity for the tangential. So many are actually unfinished or deliberately
left in a state of disarticulation: Tieck never gave us part three of Sternbald; Novalis
died before he could complete Heinrich von Ofterdingen; Brentano left Godwi in a state
of fragmentary suspension; Arnim never finished Die Kronenwächter (The Guardians of
the Crown); Hoffmann withheld the ‘‘real’’ ending of Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr);
Dorothea Schlegel even rejected the very notion of a ‘‘satisfactory conclusion’’ for
Florentin. Others, close to the Romantic movement but not of it, like Hölderlin in
Hyperion, promise ‘‘more to come’’ and fail to deliver. Some of Eichendorff’s characters
find satisfaction and repose, whereas others are destined to continue their anabases
beyond the last pages of the novel.
The popular novel of the period 1795-1815, by contrast, knew where it was going,
especially the Gothic variety. No amount of ‘‘venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly
confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves’’ (Thomas Love
Peacock’s witty dismissal of the genre in Nightmare Abbey) could prevent the hero or
heroine from emerging triumphant, virtue intact and marriage secured. But would we
really prefer Wippo von Königstein, The Double Ursuline Nun, or Elise von Eisenthurm
(actual titles from 1800)?
Alternatively, we could turn to Jean Paul’s huge novel of 1800-3, Titan (large
novels are a feature of this period). For it is both completed and of considerable
literary quality. Jean Paul is the Romantics’ older contemporary and his novels are the
most read and the most influential of the time. True, in the closing apotheosis, as in
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century novels of political intrigue and education, the
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hero Albano discovers that he is a prince, he finds a kindred spirit with whom he can
share his throne, and he looks forward to wise and beneficent rule. But at what a cost!
To achieve this, he has to learn his real identity, see human coldness destroy his first
love, and (this is an age of sentimental male bondings) experience ecstatic friendship
and its dissipation. Albano is the ingénu, the unwritten page, destined for rank and
greatness, but only at the end of processes involving pain, renunciation, and rejection.
The antihero is Roquairol, the ‘‘child and product of his age,’’ ridden by ennui and mal
du siècle. who represents the anarchy of passion. Three female characters induct Albano
into the more subtle terrain of the sentiments; he learns ethereality and exaltation,
infatuation and temptation, until head and heart are reconciled. Lest we should think
that Jean Paul makes it easy for us, we have a plot, intricate by most standards, which
opens in mid-story and needs to turn back on itself (a central symbol is a labyrinthine
garden with trompe l’oeil and spirals): identities are withheld, intrigues are plotted,
mysterious and numinous figures beckon and deceive, mechanical devices suggest
manipulations by unfeeling and impersonal forces. Add to this the set-piece descriptions of the Italian landscape, with its classical and heroic connotations, and the
denseness of the novel’s structure becomes apparent. Does it even end where it
purports to? No, Jean Paul adds a ‘‘comic appendix’’ that satirizes Fichte’s epistemology (a character with a split identity occurs in the main plot), and a balloonist whose
levitations are symbolic of his disdain for the follies and inanities of the world on
which he looks down. These ascents remind us, in their episodic structure and their
hard look at humanity, of Klingemann’s Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (The Night
Watches of Bonaventura; see below).
Goethe as influence
Jean Paul, our suggested alternative to the unfinished Romantic novel, thus involves
hard going (800 pages), convolutions of plot, and complex interplay of characters. The
reader must sustain a heavy application of platonic Idealism and sentiment, with its
rhetorical accompaniment. Jean Paul is a writer whom the Romantics cannot overlook, with whom they critically engage, to whom they allude (and whom they
satirize). Even more than to Jean Paul, they defer to the greatest living German
writer, Goethe. Does he, as a novelist, provide a model for a novel with an ending?
Werther, the world-famous novel of 1774, certainly ends, but with éclat and scandal, in
the suicide of the hero. Werther as a character casts a long shadow, and it falls on many
a Romantic hero. Where there are mood swings, stopping the ears to reason,
melancholic broodings, nature enthusiasms, and cosmic despairs, Werther is somewhere in the background. But as many authors of European Romanticism were to
discover – Chateaubriand, Constant, and Foscolo among them – Werther is inimitable.
Much of its engagement with sentimental religious culture cannot be transferred to a
younger generation. Furthermore, it subverts one of the eighteenth century’s favored
narrative forms: the epistolary novel. For we have Werther’s letters only, not their
answers. We have insight into his and others’ states of mind only through his vision.
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Then, towards the end, the narrator, where letter-writing no longer can be sustained,
breaks open the device and steps directly into the account.
The young Ludwig Tieck may have wished to write his own Werther with his novel
William Lovell (1795-6), the first important novel by a member of the Romantic
generation. It lacked the original’s dense brevity (there are three volumes). It could
not sustain the self-projection that Goethe extends to his hero (there are, as said, no
replies to Werther’s letters). The conventional epistolary form has to be restored so that
perspectives on the hero can be opened up and ironies introduced. Lovell, the young
Englishman adrift on the continent, believes he is acting through the ‘‘will’’ that gives
him his name. He is not: the secret agency of others is manipulating his every move.
There is another major difference. Werther, to give him his due, causes harm to others
only as his mind is fully deranged; he does not seize the object of his desires when he
could, and retreats instead into deluded notions of reunion in the afterlife. Lovell lives
for the here and now; he embraces a career of libertinage precisely to lose his innocence
and to be initiated into the refinements of debauchery. There is something here of the
French novel of pursuit and seduction, Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses or Restif’s Le
Paysan perverti. But it is also fair to say that all the introspections known to the century
pass here as in review, all the absolute claims of the heart and self. While this may
produce momentary exaltation, it also involves emptiness and despair, the sense of
living out a cliché. The self becomes the arbiter of all behavior: but it is a self directed by
a malevolent secret society bent on his destruction. Wickedness has its due punishment,
but one feels that there is no moral order upholding this retribution. There is no Albano
figure as in Jean Paul’s Titan, only Roquairol. Tieck sensed, at the age of 22, that he had
pushed the limits of both epistolary and Gothic novels to their extremes; no German
writer of talent would wish to fall back on the conventional novel in letters. He had
created an antihero who, even more than Werther, was in a sense living out the plots of
others’ narratives, the fictional world of the late Enlightenment as against Werther’s
Homer and Ossian.
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; 1795-6),
the novel of his maturity, appears at just the right moment for the young Romantic
generation. It provides them with some patterns for their own writing of fiction,
notably the young hero in search of development (Bildung) and personal fulfillment.
It furnishes them with a legitimation for their endeavors, once the great Goethe has
pointed the way. But Goethe is only marginally interested in the so-called proprieties
of conventional novel writing, and he is not noted for his ability to sustain a plot
from inception to end. Indeed, in Wilhelm Meister a great deal is left open or even
unsaid. The Romantic novel takes much of what it likes from Goethe, without
necessarily touching the substance. A hero who moves out of conventional society
into the Hogarthian world of actors and their itinerant existence might appeal; but
his later development, laid down by a secret society with firmly Enlightenment aims,
and his integration into the prerevolutionary landed classes, might not.
Goethe cannot, of course, resist the standard cliché of the Gothic novel, the secret
society, best known to German readers through Karl Grosse’s Der Genius, the novel
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mentioned in Northanger Abbey in its translation as Horrid Mysteries. Gothic fiction,
English in origin, migrates to Germany and returns in new guise as the novel or tale
of terror. In Germany, Schiller had dignified the genre with his Der Geisterseher (The
Ghost-Seer; 1789) a gripping tale that found attentive readers among the Romantics
(including Hoffmann); but it, too, remained unfinished. While the Romantics, in
their turn, did not necessarily accept that their heroes should have a destination and
fulfillment similar to Wilhelm Meister’s – indeed some of their early novels are
written against the grain of such readings – nevertheless mysterious, alluring,
preferably androgynous young heroines (based on Goethe’s Mignon) or equally
unfathomable, fate-ridden hermits, playing the harp for preference (Goethe’s Harfner), crop up at many turnings, their origins obscure and darkly terrible. Where
Goethe interspersed his text with just one or two of his finest lyrics (e.g., ‘‘Kennst du
das Land?’’), they, especially their great poets Brentano and Eichendorff, were prodigal
in sustained lyrical interludes in their fiction, much of highest quality. Where Goethe
had no compunction in breaking the flow of his narrative with discussions (about
Hamlet) or interleaved subplots, the Romantics made a principle of multifariousness
of form and style within the novel framework.
Theoretical considerations
This formal prodigality is not merely a homage to Wilhelm Meister: it is grounded in
theoretical discussions of what a novel is and may be. Wilhelm Meister is for many of
Goethe’s contemporaries the proof that the German novel has come of age and that the
wide-ranging theoretical discussions about the nature of the genre have come to
fruition. It is a paradox that, as novel production in Germany increases (120 titles in
1790, 375 in 1800), there is an accompanying debate, of growing intensity, about its
legitimacy and indeed its very nature. The Romantic novel has to be seen against this
background. More perhaps than in other national literary cultures the theoretical
discussion concentrated on the novel’s affinities with other literary genres. Was it the
successor to the epic, assuming the universality of that dignified genre, but relating to
the needs of modern men and women? Or was it not also related to the drama, in its
structure and its urging forward to an outcome? Was it not related to both genres in
its examination of human nature and human development? Could its very nature not
be summed up in that German word ‘‘Werden’’ which means ‘‘becoming,’’ not ‘‘being.’’
This discussion indicates that the debate was being partly driven by conventional
poetics. Wilhelm Meister, on the other hand, could be hailed as a successful experiment
surmounting such restricting considerations. Goethe’s novel contained a short theoretical discussion which defined itself and its hero in terms of ‘‘expressed notions’’
(Gesinnungen) and ‘‘events’’ (Begebenheiten); unlike the drama, it had less to do with
characters and deeds. The hero would find himself involved in processes where his role
was more passive than active, his undertakings more of a hindrance to the progress of
the plot than a catalyst; there would be more scope for chance than for personal
assertion. Schiller, whose Der Geisterseher had collapsed on this very question of outside
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manipulation of events, particularly praised the delicacy and lightness of touch with
which Goethe had brought his hero to where he wanted him to be. Friedrich Schlegel,
in the most important Romantic critique of Wilhelm Meister, went even further and
declared the inner organization of the novel to be consonant with the very principles
underlying the work of art: wholeness, universality, the seamless growing of the
individual parts into one organism (Gewächs). This, he went on to say, joined by
Novalis, was because conventional notions of order and narrative propriety are kept in
a permanent state of suspense (schweben), none obtruding to upset the delicate balance
between unconsciousness and reflection, stated purpose and irony.
These statements on Wilhelm Meister elide easily into general definitions of ‘‘Romantic art’’ and the ‘‘Romantic work of art.’’ When Friedrich Schlegel, looking for a
term to accommodate these, lighted upon the word Roman, he was prompt to point
out that this term did not indicate a literary genre as such, but an ‘‘element of poetry.’’
Such Romantic poetry always referred beyond itself to a higher, indivisible unity; it
embodied both chaos and order, purpose and ironic self-reflection. In formal terms, it
was mixed, a synthesis (but not a mere accumulation) of all genres, Universalpoesie – as
had been the Don Quixote of the great Romantic ‘‘archpoet,’’ Cervantes. Schelling’s
view of the novel as a ‘‘tableau,’’ a ‘‘mirror of the world,’’ where episodes cohere to a
higher unity, is related to this, or Karl Solger’s notion of the coherence in a ‘‘totality’’
of the most disparate elements in human nature, and their formal expression.
Theory and experiment
But could one express all this in a real novel? Almost as he was formulating his theory
of the novel, Friedrich Schlegel wrote one, as if to demonstrate the congruity of idea
and reality: Lucinde (1799). It did not immediately achieve the desired effect: readers
were affronted by the sexual candor of some situations or they expected some kind of
sustained narrative and were disappointed in finding none. Schlegel’s friend, the
theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, defended it in terms which were consonant
with Romantic aesthetics but for which the nineteenth century, by and large, was
not ready. It was only ‘‘narrative’’ in the sense that it had a beginning and an end; for
the rest, it was a series of reflections – which could be extended into infinity – about
itself; it engaged the reader in a dialogue about its own composition. The reader was
not to find here the relatively gradual progress of Wilhelm Meister; instead, there
would be interpolations, leaps, fugues – in short, a seeming chaos. Chaos was indeed
what Schlegel wanted, only, paradoxically, a ‘‘systematic chaos’’ of higher artistry. He
was seeking to give expression to ‘‘poetry without end,’’ not of course infiniteness
itself, but intimations, touches, échappées de vue, sparks of imagination that gave
insight into such fullness: what he called ‘‘arabesques.’’
If Lucinde sought to question cherished notions of character and narratorial sequence, it similarly strove to challenge accepted views of the relationship between
man and woman. Where conventional morality relegated to separate compartments
the physical and sensual and the spiritual and the intellectual, Schlegel posited their
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unity. The dominance of the male as lover or as artist is overturned: Lucinde is Julius’s
equal and each partakes of the other’s nature. Love which finds such fulfillment is
poetic, is moral, is religious; indeed for Schlegel the very principle of Romantic
poetry is love, its expression a ‘‘hieroglyph of the One eternal love.’’
Friedrich Schlegel’s wife, Dorothea Mendelssohn (the Lucinde of his novel) also
had notions of a Romantic novel. This was Florentin (1801). She had, however, more
realistic expectations of her readers’ capacity to tolerate experimentation. There are
here the requisites borrowed from elsewhere and familiar in Tieck or Hoffmann or
Eichendorff: castles in forests, livid skies rent by lightning, hunting horns (or
guitars) ready to hand and words to accompany them. They become the symbolic
accompaniment of wanderings, forays into the unknown, quests for identity, searches
for an underlying meaning of existence as yet imperfectly revealed. Thus Florentin, a
young aristocrat on his way to join the American wars of independence, is detained
instead by a noble family, learns the draw of male friendship and female companionship, shares in philanthropic schemes. We learn in a long interpolation that his
‘‘Wanderjahre’’ have taken in Italy, France, and England, and an artistic vocation.
Interspersed letters and verses add to the variety of perspectives. But Dorothea
resolutely refuses to round the narrative off with a ‘‘satisfying ending’’; it stops
instead in mid-story. The rest is left open-ended, to be completed in the reader’s
thoughts or dreams. This, she says, is infinitely preferable to the usual conclusions in
marriage or death.
Clemens Brentano’s novel Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or The
Stone Image of the Mother), published in the same year (1801) is altogether more
radical and more ‘‘Romantic.’’ The subtitle, ein verwilderter Roman (a novel run wild)
promises loss of form in the conventional sense that narrative threads are lost,
characters and their unresolved secrets and fates are introduced, letters are exchanged
which have little immediate communicative function. The notion of the individual
seems to have lost its congruity as it retreats into a variety of perspectives. Prose gives
way to poetry (some of Brentano’s best) or dramatic verse as narrative gives way to
evocation. Is this therefore the ‘‘Romantic novel par excellence,’’ as some critics aver?
Or does it represent what actually happens when Romantic aesthetic ideas, as
confidently formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, are fleshed out in the writing of fiction?
Is Romantic irony – where the moment of creative awareness carries in it the sense of
its own mutability, where perfection of form is referred to chaotic counterprocesses –
here simply destructive of form? Is Schlegel’s ‘‘higher unity’’ or ‘‘bond of ideas’’ lost
amid the shifting perspectives and changing identities? Has the writing of fiction
itself become both a theoretical and a practical impossibility?
These questions – part of the ongoing critical discussion of Godwi – raise serious
issues of form and comprehensibility. And yet a pragmatic reading of this novel is
possible: in Part One, Godwi (and others) are searching for the key to the mystery of
the statue, the opening up of childhood visions of the dead mother; in Part Two they
find their resolution, where characters, once shrouded in obscurity, are revealed and
identified. It might be said that all this has been achieved at a considerable cost, but
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that one or two of Brentano’s finest poems atone for the fractures in the main
narrative.
Yet the reader of this nearly impenetrable novel will find in it discussions of the
nature of art as mediator, as the suffusion of color into reality, as thought and form in
harmonious balance, as transference or translation. These principles can be applied to
the search for identity, self-knowledge, and fulfillment of the characters and relate
thus to the central symbol of the statue and the unveiling of its secret.
Art and history
Although there are artist figures in Brentano’s novel (and those of many others), they
are not here of central concern. What happens when an artist becomes the object and
hero of the novel? The depiction of the artist, historical or fictitious, in drama or
narrative (Künstlerdrama, Künstlerroman) is a feature peculiar to German literature in
the generation preceding the Romantics. Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1789) or Heinse’s
Ardinghello (1787) are the archetypes, where modern artistic sensitivity or awareness is
transferred into a historical setting.
Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell had been a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, a novel of
seduction and sensual gratification leading to chaos and void. With Franz Sternbalds
Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings; 1798), Tieck was to follow much closer
the patterns of Wilhelm Meister: a hero, an artist, was to get somewhere, achieve
something, and find himself; his wanderings and adventures would end in fulfillment
and maturity. That, at least, was the underlying idea. But Tieck broke off the novel
two thirds through and could never bring himself to complete it. Yet the differences
between Goethe’s and Tieck’s novels are equally apparent. They might be summed up
as follows: German present versus German past; development versus circularity; irony
and sophistication versus deliberate naı̈veté; increasing doubts about art versus the
conscious cultivation of art. The view of art expressed in Tieck’s novel was at odds
with the uncompromising Classicism which he at that time saw Goethe as professing.
Against this domination by classical antiquity and the pre-eminence of the plastic
arts, Tieck posits the German and Italian Renaissance, the world of sixteenth-century
Nuremberg, Venice, or Renaissance Rome. Art is not a system or a doctrine; it is an
article of faith, the object of worship, accepted with childlike devotion. An artist so
inspired – Franz Sternbald is one – will in one crucial way never ‘‘grow up.’’ The many
wanderings and adventures and encounters (some erotic) which he undergoes would
(had the novel been finished) have landed him back in Nuremberg, his original views
merely confirmed. His anabases and searchings, through a world of changing sensations and disguises, might have answered the question: who am I? He might have
been reunited with the girl whose image haunts him as the object of memory and
longing.
The history – we meet the pious and sober Albrecht Dürer in his Nuremberg
studio, and Lukas van Leyden – is vague and stereotyped: Northern worth versus the
enticements of the South. The sensitivities of the characters – Sternbald’s melancholy
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and longing – are essentially modern. The discussions on art center on religious
painting (a Romantic preoccupation) but also on landscape depiction, and as such
they point forward to Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich. But to many
of the novel’s readers – who included Brentano, Arnim, Eichendorff, and Runge – the
‘‘message’’ was more important than any historical accuracy. The present, our world
tainted with Enlightenment utilitarianism, must be referred to the past, and such a
referral will reinstill in modern artists the simple-heartedness and devotion of earlier
ages. Certainly the young German painters in Rome, known as the Nazarenes, read
the novel as the bible of a religious cult of art.
Tieck’s close friend Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) also sought to produce a
novel that would go beyond the scope of Wilhelm Meister and celebrate the artist while
taking in the sweep of history. It was to be his Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), in two
parts, the second unfinished. Not all Romantic readers of Wilhelm Meister shared
Friedrich Schlegel’s enthusiasm, and Novalis was no exception. Goethe’s novel seemed
to end in prose; Novalis’s would end in poetry, indeed in an apotheosis that would
usher in a golden age. The setting would not be Tieck’s age of Dürer and Raphael, but
the high Middle Ages, with its legends, its chivalry, its crusades, and its estates. Its
adherence to history would be marginally closer than Tieck’s, but each event and each
encounter was to function at the same time as a prefiguration of a higher, spiritual
process, the key to the opening up of ‘‘das Wunderbare’’ and the reign of poetry.
Heinrich differs from Wilhelm Meister in that he has in his mind a vision of poetry.
He must meet persons – merchants, an oriental slave girl, a miner, a hermit, a poet,
and finally his love Mathilde – who confront him with the individual processes
(nature, war , history, love) of which poetry is the whole manifestation. The interpolated stories and poems mirror his progress from ‘‘Expectation’’ (Part One) to ‘‘Fulfillment’’ (Part Two). (Novalis’s novel has none of the lyrical effusiveness of Sternbald.)
A dream is to be fulfilled; the real processes of life are to be subsumed under poetry.
Indeed, the unfinished second part is intended to lead the hero through the experienced reality of the things adumbrated in song and story, until all things are brought
together, biblical-style (apocatastasis panton), in a new Jerusalem. In this way, the
hero’s ‘‘development’’ involves the Romantic interiorizing and spiritualizing of all
pragmatic experience (‘‘Weg nach Innen’’), imparting to events a higher mythological
sense and destination. In this, history and poetry are seen as an indivisible process.
For Novalis, but much less for Tieck, the past is subsumed under mythology, and
the novel has the function of plotting the process whereby reality and imagination,
historical past and timeless myth, coalesce. For Tieck, the historical background may
remind us of past models of artistic piety (Dürer, Raphael), but his notion of the artist
is essentially modern. Yet in works of nonfiction, editions of medieval poetry and
epic, Tieck was to make the crucial link between an integrated past, where poetry,
chivalry, church, and state cohered as one organism, and a present where these were
either lost or fragmented. In Arnim, Hoffmann, and Eichendorff, who usher in a
second phase of the Romantic novel, we see these ideas worked out in fiction. Either it
seeks to forge the link between historical past and present (Arnim) or it places modern
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men and women and their society and their anxieties in the foreground (Eichendorff,
Hoffmann, and Arnim).
Not surprisingly, both Tieck and Novalis kept their distance from the popular
medievalizing fiction of the day, the Ritterromane. Yet this flourishing subgenre was
also to find its way into Romantic circles with Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué and his
much-read Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring) or Sintram, loosely based on medieval or
Nordic romance. Fouqué is a naı̈ve and prolific writer who knows how to dress up the
Middle Ages in a guise that will appeal to a vogue for all things past. It is a step from
this medievalizing dressing up to Achim von Arnim’s ‘‘historical novel’’ Die Kronenwächter (The Guardians of the Crown; first part 1817, second published posthumously
1854). Coming relatively late in the movement, it relates only loosely to Tieck and
Novalis, and almost not at all to Wilhelm Meister. Novalis had seen historical processes
urging towards fulfillment, to the now restored paradise, ending in the unsayable and
the inexpressible. Tieck had placed Franz Sternbald in a past society, but that setting
was at most vague and at all times subordinate to questions of artistic development.
Arnim is in the strict sense no more ‘‘historical’’ than Fouqué; he borrows unashamedly from Gothic fiction (the secret society again); he elides folk motifs and
those of higher poetry. His aim is not to evoke the past as it was, like Scott, but as he
believes it could have been. To this end, Arnim takes elements from all manner of
sources to present a sixteenth century of his own making, the time of Faust and
Maximilian, Dürer and Luther, with little regard for chronology and with at most a
tortuous narrative thread. His two heroes are scions of the Hohenstaufens; but that
once mighty dynasty is now a secret brotherhood devoted to worldly gain and with
little sense of its historical mission. The adventures and encounters of the heroes are
there to demonstrate how they, too, seek and only partially find, a sense and purpose
in shifting times, with peasants’ wars and changing allegiances. In all this, it is the
poet-seer who is able to show the underlying processes of history. Like Novalis’s novel,
it is poeticized Heilsgeschichte, the story of human salvation; but Arnim concentrates
less on fulfillment than on lost origins and on strivings towards a redemption yet to
be achieved.
The social message
Unlike Novalis’s novel, Die Kronenwächter is sharply focused on historical turmoils and
upheavals; these point forward symbolically to the collapse of values in Arnim’s own
time in the wake of Napoleon, and he highlights those features that will lead
eventually to the restoration of moral and spiritual values in the nation. This is an
essentially conservative message, and Arnim’s earlier novel, Gräfin Dolores (Countess
Dolores; 1810), applied it to contemporary society. If Die Kronenwächter presents us
with colorful tableaux and action piled upon action, Gräfin Dolores seems to enact
Universalpoesie (it contains, in addition to the main plot, a short novel, several stories,
various dramatic interludes, ballads, and lyrical ‘‘impromptus’’). It reflects – perhaps
as an extreme example – the insouciance towards outer form that characterizes the
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German Romantic novel, requiring the reader to find an inner symbolic order.
Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years; 1829), while different thematically in almost every respect from Arnim’s,
displays a similar multiperspectivity and openness to form. Arnim’s plot moves
between Germany and Sicily, and takes in, apart from the main characters, a host of
ancillary figures and what befalls them. This is clearly not the world of the earlier
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; but it might be closer in one crucial respect to Goethe’s
middle novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities; 1808). For that novel had
dealt (among other things) with problems of love and marriage in modern aristocratic
society. Arnim found its message ambiguous and wished to reinforce it with his own
novel of marriage, adultery, and penance. Where Goethe left open any question of the
wider social implications of his story of fatal attractions, Arnim was intent on making
his novel a mirror of the Zeitgeist and its several manifestations, raffish and impious,
spiritual and ascetic. The loss of spiritual values that is typical of postrevolutionary
society contrasts with the awareness of family, religion, and nation, as the basis of a
renewal. It is the same underlying belief in a historical process that informs Die
Kronenwächter, but here with the focus on the contemporary stage of its unfolding.
Joseph von Eichendorff was a great admirer of Die Gräfin Dolores. He elevated it as a
model of ‘‘Gesinnung,’’ that inward moral and religious attitude that gives all true
poetry its raison d’être, its life and its vitality; he saw its poet set in a great tree of life,
raised above the affairs of humankind, as an intermediary between humankind and
God. Eichendorff’s novels Ahnung und Gegenwart (Intimation and Present; 1815) and
its later companion piece, Dichter und ihre Gesellen (Poets and Their Companions;
1835), are ‘‘Romantic’’ on a surface level: they revel in mystery, disguise, mistaken
identity, labyrinthine landscapes, enchanted gardens, distant echoes of hunting horns.
Yet the seeming chaos of relationships and the fluctuations in settings are subject to a
hidden order. Characters are led, as if by chance, but in reality by design, to
encounters where they learn to understand their own selves, and where they have
come from. The views out into nature are in reality ‘‘prospects’’ of a higher level of
existence. symbolized by the Christian emblems of the sun or the cross. The
‘‘Ahnung’’ and ‘‘Gegenwart’’ of the title thus point as narrative principles to the
present – a society, like Arnim’s, that has lost its way and no longer recognizes
spiritual values – and to a transfiguration of that present through intimations of a
higher order of things. The hero, Count Friedrich, must confront the dark side of
human nature, resist the allurements of passion, plunge himself into the turmoil of
the times, before retreating into the safe haven of a monastery. But other characters
find their fulfillment either in poetry or even in active practical life. Dichter und ihre
Gesellen is differently focused: it takes four poets or would-be poets and confronts
them with the dichotomies of art and life. One opts for the Romantic enticements of
Italy; one prefers a shifting identity within a wandering troupe of actors; one finds
solace in the church; one finds no anchorage in life and seeks death. There is no doubt
where Eichendorff’s own conservative sympathies lie, yet each of these conflicts and
their various resolutions, is presented as real and credible in the terms of the novel.
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Psychic terror, and parody
Jean Paul’s Titan and Arnim’s Gräfin Dolores each contain a character who takes his
own life while acting out a role on the stage. It is Wilhelm Meister taken to extreme,
the stage becoming a symbol of a world theater of absurdity and nothingness, real
death preferable to its mere stage enactment. These images, and many others, that
became the vocabulary of European mal du siècle and Weltschmerz, occur as a ground
bass in August Klingemann’s Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (Night Watches of
Bonaventura; 1804). These 16 night watches rehearse, in seemingly capricious order,
the inanities of human existence. They are ‘‘night pieces’’ (Nachtstücke) à la Breughel,
to remind us of the dark side of humanity, its crimes and inhumanities covered by
darkness. Bonaventura the night watchman – a foundling, the devil presiding over his
birth – is less a real character than a wearer of masks. If these scenes have any
coherence as a novel, it is as a series of reflections that could continue ad infinitum,
as ‘‘arabesques,’’ witnessing to the structure of the universe in its fullness. But a
fullness of what? Of appearance that has no substance, of an ego constantly consuming
itself (a parody of Fichte), as fiction, not as reality, a cosmic bad novel, a tragedy, a
tragicomedy, a puppet play directed by Harlequin or an incompetent stage director
(God) to whose whims we are subjected. Or playing out a role, never living in real
substance, mechanically, consumed with ennui. From role playing and theater, it is but
a step to the radical denial of any sense of existence. The last ‘‘watch’’ ends with the
word ‘‘Nichts!’’
Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura coheres at most as a narrative in cycles of despair
with recurrent motifs, E. Th. A. Hoffmann’s novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s
Elixirs; 1815-17), by contrast, follows much more the patterns of popular fiction that
have us on the edge of our chairs. But the novel bears only a superficial relationship to
Der Genius, or M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (which Hoffmann certainly knew). Nevertheless the novel is hard to put down, packed as it is with incidents in breathless sequence
(intrigue, murder, rape), involving the church (the pope, no less), the state (a princely
court) and their intertwining relations. The monk Medardus, who believes he has
drunk the devil’s elixirs and then embarks on a career of wickedness and deceit, is led
into a tangle of relationships whose solution we as readers are agog to find out. But
the ‘‘terror’’ is not provided by the stock-in-trade of Gothic motifs, those ‘‘ghastly
confederates’’: it is the terror in the hero’s own mind, his sense of the loss of self,
indeed of seeing his own self, his own Doppelgänger. So great is Medardus’s consternation at these confrontations that we, too, share in his mental anguish: we have no
reason to believe that he is not the one who is carrying out the deeds. We suspend
disbelief because the narrator is using the first person and we allow ourselves to accept
his explanation or motivation. His self, he says, has fallen into the hands of mysterious
forces (the words ‘‘fate,’’ ‘‘machine,’’ or ‘‘tool’’ are used without much distinction) who
merge him into alien figures and alienate him from his own personality. Medardus is
weighed down with the burden of guilt for misdeeds which, he senses, are the
workings of those inscrutable ‘‘forces.’’ Yet, in the end, a Doppelgänger, Medardus’s
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darker self, Viktorin, proves to be the real perpetrator, his own brother, whose origins
are similarly veiled in mystery. But it is essential to the narrative that Medardus feels
the guilt for this catalogue of crimes and that it becomes the substance of his own
confession. They are not related for our perverse delectation, but to establish, as best
can be done, the congruities of cause and effect, of guilt and penance. The narrator
keeps us in suspense, so that we feel at the end all the more the effect of redemption
and the resolution of the tangled skein of his life’s story. The agency of Medardus’s
deeds, readily attributed to those ‘‘forces’’ or even to ‘‘the sins of the fathers,’’ is
countered by the appeal to conscience and consciousness. Medardus learns that people
must live with the consequences of their actions, even in ascetic renunciation. Thus
this Gothic ‘‘Confessional of the Black Penitent’’ also ends with a very Catholic call to
penance, and a kind of transfiguration.
Yet not all of the novel is borne along by such edifying considerations. Humor is a
countervailing factor. There is the character called Belcampo, a barber, responsible for
changing appearances, who stands back from his own bizarre character by subjecting
it to laughter. This is his remedy for the personality split that so terrifies Medardus.
Hoffmann’s other novel, Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr; 1820-1) makes these two levels of
self-awareness into the structural principle of its composition. And yet this most
bizarre of Romantic novels does not fall into the convenient categories of either
humor or terror. Its title is that of the eponymous hero, a learned tomcat with literary
pretensions; indeed it is the diary of a literary nobody, a Bildungsroman of education in
banality, social climbing (on roofs), and philistinism. The parody – and very funny it
is – shows us a life, uncomplicated in itself, in which every element can be accounted
for. But interleaved by accident into the cat’s life is the fragmentary and tortured
account of the musician Kreisler, at a court (more satire), with its attendant intrigues
and love relationships. If Murr’s life is ‘‘complete,’’ Kreisler’s falls apart, fugitive, torn
between art and love, sardonic, melancholic. The humorous parody gives way to bitter
satire, emotional confusion, but also to glimpses of a higher artistic existence as yet
unfulfilled. Humor, both bright and black, is perhaps the only unifying principle in
this novel. However, the figure of Meister Abraham, the manipulator of machines and
apparatuses (and the owner of the cat), stands in both camps. Hoffmann devotes twothirds of his novel to Kreisler; he rounds off Murr’s life with an obituary, whereas
Kreisler’s ends in mystery and confusion, with no resolution of the claims of art and
reality. It is the one side of the Romantic message, from Sternbald and Godwi, to Kater
Murr and thence to Dichter und ihre Gesellen, that points out beyond itself in open
form, unfinished messages, and unresolved prospects. Poetry, as all of these novels tell
us, will not allow itself to be inhibited by narratorial constraints.
Short Fiction (Novelle)
The complexity and many-sidedness of Romantic notions of personality, artistry,
history, and society are best evidenced in the Romantic novel (and to some extent
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the Romantic drama). As we saw, this can occasionally subject the novel form to
strains which it cannot easily sustain, or the novel is seen in such commodious and
universal terms that conventional compositional features (such as an ending) may be
suspended. As a movement, German Romanticism is caught up in political and social
events between 1795 and 1815. The élan for some longer poetic projects (Sternbald,
Kronenwächter) cannot be sustained in these upheavals and they remain fragmentary.
Paradoxically, however, German Romantic theory saw the fragment always in relation
to the whole, never in isolation; it saw excrescences on the whole (arabesques) as
pointing to the universal richness and fullness of poetic creation. In those terms,
therefore, we are able to supply in our minds the continuations or fulfillments and
‘‘divine’’ the endings. Thus Heinrich von Ofterdingen traces selectively the processes of
nature, history, art, and love that are intended to come together in one poetic
synthesis at the end. Franz Sternbald’s commitment to art will remain constant and
integrated even when those wanderings reach their (as yet unreached) goal. The
glimpses of the legendary Hohenstaufen castle in Die Kronenwächter intimate that
higher historical processes will some day unite the contingent and the imagined.
Kreisler’s existence at the end of Kater Murr, by contrast, suggests an endless and
unsatisfied quest for a resolution of life and art. But Hoffmann is too interested in
Kreisler to leave it at that: the Kreisleriana in his collection of short fiction, Fantasiestücke, are part of that further existence, although not related to the plot of Kater
Murr.
It has been traditional in criticism to see the less accessible Romantic novel as at
most an adjunct to the much more readable and readily amenable short prose fiction
of the Romantics, pearls in a chain, unlike the inchoate mass of the larger fiction.
Romantic theory (Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel both had views on the
subject) did seize on the Novelle as part of its notion of Universalpoesie, stressing the
needs of the moment, the urgency for action, as against the more gradual processes of
the novel. But it also saw the Novelle as having affinities with the drama, and with the
fairy tale: there was no wish to contain its scope within one category. The Novelle,
essentially, draws on the same wellsprings of poetry as any other genre.
The injunction to record brief and extraordinary incidents in concentrated form had
been part of the history of the European short story (novela/novella/nouvelle/Novelle)
since the Renaissance. Similarly, it had been expected to relate to its own society, but
to that which was out of the ordinary inside that framework. Goethe, with his
collection of 1795, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German
Emigrés) in the same year as the first part of Wilhelm Meister, had illustrated very
neatly the contrast between these two different, but related, modes of focus. Goethe’s
later Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, by contrast, were to
be novels structured around interspersed Novellen. Novellen, seen in this structural
context, form part of the pattern of episode and subsection that we have seen in
Arnim’s Die Gräfin Dolores and in Eichendorff’s two novels. In Arnim’s case, one
interspersed story is a continuation of the series of tales told in his earlier Novelle
collection, Der Wintergarten (The Winter Garden; 1808), taken from earlier chronicled
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sources. Similarly, his Novelle collections of 1812 and later take up combinations of
characters and situations, often bizarre and grotesque, in combinations reminiscent of
the first part of Die Gräfin Dolores. The reference to times of historical crisis,
revolution, Zeitgeist, that informs these stories, also makes a link with the novel.
Similarly, the theme of wandering, seeking one’s fortune, moving between the
German homeland and the exotic delights of Italy, that inform both of Eichendorff’s
novels, are brought together in consummate form in his well-known story, Aus dem
Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-nothing), while the sinuous
landscape that symbolizes the enticements of the flesh is the focus of the story Das
Marmorbild (The Marble Statue). One can extend this pattern to other authors.
Novalis’s story, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Initiates at Sais; 1798), a symbolized
dialogue on the philosophy of nature, relates forward to the theme and structure of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Brentano’s ‘‘run wild’’ narrative in Godwi, with its deliberately torn lines of communication, corresponds in simpler fashion to the levels of
communication and the tragic misunderstanding underlying the later story Vom
braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (Of Honest Kasperl and Fair Annerl). The
many stories for which Hoffmann is famous are often individual points of focus of
the great themes of the novels: visions of terror, disturbed personality, plays on
identity and consciousness, flights of imagination, satire (Der Sandmann [The Sandman], Ignaz Denner, Ritter Gluck [Chevalier Gluck], Das Fräulein von Scuderi, Meister
Floh [Master Flea]). It is also fair to say that his best-known stories of fantasy and its
fulfillment (Der goldne Topf [The Golden Pot], Prinzessin Brambilla [Princess Brambilla]) move far beyond the confines set by the two novels.
Similarly, the stories for which Ludwig Tieck is best known (Der blonde Eckbert
[Fair-Haired Eckbert], Der Runenberg, Liebeszauber [Love’s Enchantment]), like Franz
Sternbalds Wanderungen, take up the question: who am I? Where Sternbald’s encounters, in their multiformity of experience, contribute to self-revelation, the stories focus
on one particular meeting, a confrontation with the unknown in oneself. The
revelations of self in these Novellen are fatal; they open up abysses of memory, of the
past, blurred lines between imagination and reality, where the mind cracks and
madness and death beckon.
These themes, also present on a different level in the Gothic elements of the
Romantic novel, are part of the Romantic extension of the Novelle repertoire beyond
its habitual arsenal of extraordinary (but true) happenings, into areas where the
traditional patterns of explanation no longer hold. At their most uncompromising,
Heinrich von Kleist’s stories explore the tragic potential of the Novelle, tragic because
the certitudes or reconciliations of the European tradition are no longer valid and
human frailty and misunderstanding replace an underlying world order. It is, however, to this day a matter of debate whether Kleist can rightly be called a Romantic.
Some Romantic authors, notably Tieck, Arnim, and Hoffmann, wished their stories
to be read as a collective identity, with the framework pattern familiar from Boccaccio
and others. Through this, we meet the society of narrators and auditors and their
expectations; we see the relationship between them and the stories they are given to
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relate. The ‘‘tale of terror,’’ such as Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert, can thus coexist with
gentler and more appealing narratives, even with fairy tale. The disturbing effects of
the one are relativized by the appeal to a different level of imagination. With these
collections, Tieck’s Phantasus, Arnim’s Der Wintergarten, Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Fraternity), the way is open for the fairy tale collection as an
exclusive genre: the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen; 181222). But that is another story altogether.
References and Further Reading
Behler, E. (1993). Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Blackall, E. A. (1983). The Novels of the German
Romantics. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Heiderich, M. W. (1982). The German Novel of
1800. A Study of Popular Prose Fiction. Berne:
Peter Lang.
Paulin, R. (1985). The Brief Compass. The Nineteenth-Century German Novelle. Oxford: Clarendon.
Purver, J. (1989). Hindeutung aus das Höhere. A
Structural Study of the Novels of Joseph von Eichendorff. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Saul, N. (1984). History and Poetry in Novalis and
in the Tradition of the German Enlightenment.
London: Bithell Series of Dissertations/MHRA.
Saul, N. (ed.) (2002). Philosophy and German Literature 1700-1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Steinecke, H. and Wahrenburg, F. (eds.) (1999).
Romantheorie. Texte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart.
Stuttgart: Reclam.
Swales, M. (1977). The German Novelle. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
8
The Romantic Fairy Tale
Kari Lokke
The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent, to be sure,
but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of
the Thousand-and-One Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or
capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers – more’s the pity. (Dai Sijie 2001)
‘‘The poet . . . either is nature or he will seek her. The former is the naı̈ve, the latter the
sentimental poet’’ writes Friedrich Schiller in his 1795 Naı̈ve and Sentimental Poetry
(Schiller 1966: 110). In this brief formula, Schiller offers a succinct definition of
European Romanticism, emphasizing its acute consciousness of the disappearance of
the natural world into urbanization, industrialization, and the artificiality of ‘‘civilization.’’ For Schiller, the sentimental poet gives expression to a longing for nature
that resembles the nostalgia of the adult for the child, the sick for the healthy, the
‘‘civilized’’ for the ‘‘simple.’’ Though Schiller himself defined the naı̈ve and sentimental as universal, ahistorical types while at the same time also identifying the sentimental with the modern and the naı̈ve with the ancient, future critics and poets
historicized Schiller’s categories such that the sentimental poet became virtually
synonymous with the Romantic era artist. Influenced by the sociopolitical perspectives of Germaine de Staël’s De la littérature (1800) and the historicism of Friedrich
Schlegel’s conception of the Romantic in his Athenäums-Fragmente (1798) and Gespräch
über die Poesie (1799), August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die dramatische Kunst
und Literatur (1808) canonized and simplified Schiller’s sentimental/naı̈ve opposition
into the categories of Romantic/classic, culture/nature, North/South, spirit/body,
melancholy/joy, Christian/pagan. This understanding of the Romantic, disseminated
through Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1811) and through Coleridge’s lectures and writings,
then gave impetus to the crucial theoretical works and definitions of European
Romanticism written by its poetic practitioners: Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell (1827),
Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare (1832), Heine’s early and appreciative essay ‘‘Die
The Romantic Fairy Tale
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Romantik’’ as well as his later hostile polemic Die romantische Schule (1832-3) and
Baudelaire’s Le Salon de 1846. Conceptions of Romanticism based in Schiller’s
categories of the naı̈ve and sentimental are still prevalent today in works as varied
as Hans Robert Jauss’s Literaturgeschichte als Provocation, M. H. Abram’s Natural
Supernaturalism, and Juliet Sychrava’s Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics.
Nostalgia for Nature and Romantic Reflexivity
Acknowledging the enormous impact of Schiller’s typology, this chapter surveys a
literary phenomenon characteristic of and in some senses unique to the Romantic era –
the effort of the individual, self-conscious poet to imitate and recreate the effect of
folk art that is the product of a collective, popular, and anonymous voice. Or, as
Schiller would put it, it examines the striving of the sentimental poet to become
nature, to emulate the naı̈ve in his or her own work through a kind of spiral-like
movement that allows a return to origins, a conscious innocence. This effort takes
many forms, from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) whose naı̈veté Blake
himself highlighted in the later Songs of Experience (1794), to the well-known attempt
in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) to
narrate incidents from common or ‘‘low and rustic life’’ in simple ‘‘language really
used by men.’’ My focus here is the incorporation of folklore motifs, characters, and
plotlines into the Kunstmärchen (art fairy tale), conte de fée, or conte merveilleux (wonder
tale) that flowered in the Romantic era. This quintessentially Romantic genre takes
many forms, both lyrical and narrative, poetic and fictional, and is distinguished by
the poetic license taken by the writer with the original folkloric materials and by the
highly self-conscious irony of the narrative voice (see Jocelyne Kolb’s chapter on
Romantic Irony).
Romantic nostalgia for nature and ‘‘the primitive’’ has its eighteenth-century roots
in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose entire oeuvre can be read as a challenge to Enlightenment faith in historical and social progress. Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de
l’inégalité (1755) famously posits a hypothetical state of nature characterized by a
peace and harmony that is destroyed by the historical development of human society.
Similarly, his earlier Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) accuses poets and
philosophers, in their attempts to civilize humanity, of corrupting virtue and contributing to the moral decline of the human race. And his Essai sur l’origine des langues
(1781) glorifies Homer’s ‘‘divine songs’’ and early oral poetry in general as vigorous,
passionate language of the heart in contrast to the ‘‘more exact and clear, but more
sluggish, subdued, and cold’’ (Rousseau 1990: 249) written word of modern Europe.
Indeed, Schiller’s essay on the naı̈ve and sentimental is perhaps, above all else, an
attempt to vindicate human capacity for self-improvement and perfectibility in the
face of Rousseau’s charge in the Discourse on Inequality that it may be ‘‘the source of all
man’s miseries,’’ drawing man ‘‘out of that original condition, in which he would
spend calm and innocent days’’ and making him ‘‘his own and Nature’s tyrant’’
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(Rousseau 1990: 149). The writers of Kunstmärchen and contes merveilleux/contes de fée
can be said to join Schiller in their creation of artifacts that seek to unite the
sentimental and the naı̈ve, to honor and recapture this lost innocence self-consciously.
In between Rousseau’s essays and that of Schiller, Johann Gottfried Herder enters
this cosmopolitan conversation in his Über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (1772).
Styling himself as a German Rousseau in his ‘‘enthusiasm for the savage,’’ Herder
celebrates what he terms the ‘‘spirit of nature’’ in ancient poetry – its energy,
immediacy of feeling, and liveliness in contrast to the ‘‘falseness, weakness, and
artificiality’’ of the poetry of his day (Herder 1993: 456, 474; my translations).
Modern poets seem crippled and lame, according to Herder, when held up to the
vigor and power of Homer and Ossian (whom he took to be an authentic thirdcentury bard of the Scottish Highlands, rather than the construct created from Gaelic
ballads collected and reworked by Herder’s contemporary James Macpherson that he
turned out to be). Herder’s admiration for Ossian and for the folk poetry collected in
Thomas Percy’s antiquarian Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) combined
with nationalistic antipathy to the cultural hegemony of French Classicism compels
him to issue an impassioned call to his compatriots to begin the vital task of
collecting this cultural treasure before it vanishes altogether. German folklore, Herder
asserts, can hold its own against even the best of the Scottish ballads or romances he
so admires:
Folk songs from more than one province are familiar to me, songs that in the liveliness
of their rhythms, the naı̈veté and strength of their speech yield nothing to those of other
countries; but who collects them? Who concerns himself with them? Concerns himself
with songs of the people? In our streets and alleys and fish markets? In the unschooled
roundelay of the country folk? . . . who would want to collect them – who would have
them published for our critics who can measure out and scan syllables so well? We’d
rather, as a diversion, read our new beautifully printed poets. (Herder 1993: 480; my
translation)
Beyond its echoes in Schiller, Herder’s rhetoric powerfully influenced the next
generation of German intellectuals, the German Romantics, who took up Herder’s
challenge to commit the German oral tradition to the written page. The second
generation, or Heidelberg Romantics, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim,
collected folk songs in the early years of the nineteenth century that were published in
1805 under the title of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) and were
accompanied by a programmatic essay on folksongs written by Arnim. Volumes Two
and Three followed in 1808. Arnim’s nationalistic essay bemoans the disappearance of
folksongs in England, Italy, and above all in France, which he deems poorest in its
fund of surviving folk culture. With powerful ecological symbolism, Arnim warns
against the loss of its oral tradition, a loss he equates with both the destruction of
nature and a flattening movement toward uniformity of culture. ‘‘When the summits
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of high mountains are once deforested, rain washes the soil down and no timber will
grow again. That Germany will not be squandered away in this fashion is the aim of
our endeavor’’ (Arnim 1992: 169; my translation).
Joining Arnim and Brentano in this effort to preserve German folk culture were
their friends and colleagues Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm whose two volumes, Kinderund Hausmärchen, gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm (1812, 1815), have remained the
most widely read and best loved collections of European folk tales to this day.
Following Herder, Wilhelm Grimm in his Preface to the 1819 edition emphasizes
the need to preserve a vanishing oral culture. ‘‘It is probably just the right time to
collect these tales, since those who have been preserving them are becoming ever
harder to find’’ (Tatar 2003: 264). And, like Arnim, Grimm sees their task as a
metaphorical preservation of (cultivated) nature – preserving seeds from a crop
devastated by storms as ‘‘seed for the future’’ (Tatar 2003: 264). In the late eighteenth
century, Johann Karl August Musäus had published Volksmärchen der Deutschen (17827), but, as John Ellis has observed, a crucial difference between the two is immediately
evident from their titles. Musäus’s tales are announced as having been written by him,
whereas ‘‘the Grimms apparently collected theirs’’ (Ellis 1983: 6). Indeed the 1819
Preface includes a tendentious attack on previous anthologizers who used folktales as
the raw material for their own embellished and reworked creations as violators of what
he sees as the simplicity, innocence, and purity of authentic folk art. For most of the
last two centuries, then, the Grimm brothers have been viewed as having heeded
Herder’s call to seek out folk tales in the streets, alleys, fish markets, and farms and
record them, as anthropological pioneers in the science of collecting folklore. Furthermore, Ellis notes, the Grimm brothers ‘‘presented the Kinder und Hausmärchen to
their public essentially as a monument of national folklore’’ (Ellis 1983: 6).
In fact, it’s now clear the Grimm brothers significantly rewrote the original tales
and that the sources for many of their fairy tales turned out to be young, literate, and
middle-class friends and relations of the Grimm brothers or descendants of French
Huguenots who offered them versions of Charles Perrault’s tales, rather than the
German peasants touted by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This fact says less about their
desire to perpetrate a fraud on the public – Ellis’s argument – than it does about the
overwhelming cultural pressure they felt, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, to
recreate and preserve the authentic, pure, naı̈ve spirit of Germanic folklore.1 Nevertheless, given the enormous worldwide popularity of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales
and the rich, global tradition of rewritings they have stimulated, one is compelled to
conclude that they were overwhelmingly successful in preserving this folk-tale
tradition as ‘‘seed for the future,’’ though not in the protoanthropological and
nationalistic sense they had perhaps originally intended.
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Realms of the Kunstmärchen: Aesthetics, Metaphysics,
Psychology, Sociology
Similarly, the self-conscious Kunstmärchen may also be said to be a creation unique to
the Romantic era that it has bequeathed to the future. It is difficult to overestimate
either the significance of the fairy tale for the development of German Romantic
aesthetics or the wealth and richness of the form as it took shape in the hands of its
many practitioners. In their own writings, the earlier Jena Romantics (the Schlegels,
Schelling, Novalis, and Tieck) and the Heidelberg Romantics were free from the
concerns for strict authenticity and faithfulness to folk tradition reflected in the
Grimm brothers’ presentations of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to their public. As I
have suggested, they in fact reveled in the self-reflexivity that characterized their
artful fairy tales. Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg), central Romantic theorist of the Kunstmärchen, defined it as the quintessence of literature, the highest
art: ‘‘The fairy tale is as it were the canon of poetry – everything poetic must be fairy
tale like’’ (Novalis 1960, III: 449; my translation). For Novalis, the ideal fairy tale,
like the dream, purifies reality and takes it to a higher power, thus revealing a
spiritual nature beyond mundane or empirical reality: ‘‘A fairy tale is actually like a
dream – without coherence. An ensemble of wondrous things and occurrences – for
example, a musical fantasy – the harmonious result of an Aeolian harp – nature itself’’
(Novalis 1960, III: 454; my translation).
According to Novalis, even the novel should transform itself into fairy tale as it
develops. Thus his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, though unfinished and posthumously
published in 1802, includes in its last pages a celebration of a return to the
prelapsarian innocence of a world of flowers and childhood, a rejuvenation manifested
in a ‘‘green mysterious carpet of love’’ (Novalis 1964: 163) that covers the earth:
‘‘Deep down, childhood is close to earth, while clouds are perhaps the manifestation of
a second, higher childhood, of paradise regained, and hence let their showers fall so
beneficently on this other childhood’’ (Novalis 1964: 164). A Bildungsroman written
in reaction or protest against Goethe’s cynical and worldly Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(1795) which Novalis termed ‘‘odious, a Candide against poetry’’ (Novalis 1964: 7),
Heinrich von Ofterdingen tells the tale of its hero’s search for a mystical blue flower
associated with an ideal love, Mathilde. Mathilde’s father, the wise poet Klingsohr,
relates the fairy tale (begun separately in 1799 and later inserted into the novel) that
concludes Part I of the novel and constitutes the climax of the novel as it stands.
Structured by the interactions among a host of allegorical, archetypal characters,
the Klingsohr Märchen depicts the transformation of the universe by the spirit of
poetry embodied in a little girl named Fable, the child of Mind and Ginnistan
(Imagination). Replete with the hermetic, neoplatonic, and alchemical symbolism
so prominent in the genre of the Romantic fairy tale as a whole, it also reveals the
influence of Schiller’s philosophy of history and Jacob Boehme’s mysticism. The
Klingsohr cosmos is composed of three realms. The upper kingdom, ruled by
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Arcturus, is an icy northern world of eternal light inhabited by the princess Freya,
Arcturus’s beautiful daughter who suffers from the cold in this frozen realm. The
middle world is home to Mind and Heart and their child Eros as well as Mind’s child
by Ginnistan, Fable. The two other inhabitants are Sophia or Wisdom and her
opposite, a sour and sullen chronicler, the Scribe, identified by Novalis as ‘‘petrifying
and petrified Reason.’’ In the dark, cavernous lower world guarded by a mysterious
Sphinx, live the three Fates, allies of the evil Scribe, who true to their names, are
ancient hags spinning and cutting the threads of life.
The rejuvenation and transfiguration of the Klingsohr cosmos is sparked by
Arcturus’s command to his soldier Iron to cast his sword into the world so that,
paradoxically, ‘‘they may know where peace (Freya) lies’’ (Novalis 1964: 123). The
sword, transformed by Ginnistan into an ouroboros, changes the child Eros into a
young man who, accompanied by Ginnistan, embarks upon his search for Freya. In
their absence, the wicked Scribe and his cronies take over the middle realm and Fable
takes action against them through a complex series of journeys. She claims her lyre in
the kingdom of Arcturus, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, and defeats the Fates in the
underworld. In the middle realm, the Scribe has set fire to her foster mother Heart; the
funeral pyre reaches to the sun and consumes it in an apocalyptic conflagration that
ultimately signals the end of time. Fable then gathers the ashes of Heart in a vessel and
Sophia distributes them in a communion ritual to all present. The fairy tale concludes as
the boundaries between the realm of Arcturus and the middle kingdom vanish, Eros is
united with his beloved Freya, and the entire cast of characters celebrates ‘‘an eternal
festival of spring’’ (Novalis 1964: 147). War is banished to an alabaster and black
marble chessboard; the Fates and their Sphinx are captured in porphyry and basalt
statues as their kingdom rises from below. Fable’s earlier prophecies are fulfilled as she
proclaims in conclusion: ‘‘The kingdom of eternity is founded, / By love and peace all
strife has been impounded, / The dreams of pain are gone, to plague us never, / Sophia is
priestess of all hearts forever’’ (Novalis 1964: 148).
If Novalis, after a period of inordinate admiration of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister,
ultimately rejected it as ‘‘repulsive’’ and ‘‘foolish,’’ ‘‘a satire on poetry [and] religion’’
(Novalis 1964: 6), he was, on the other hand, strongly influenced by Goethe’s own
The Fairy Tale published in 1795, an enigmatic text that can be said to introduce the
genre of the Kunstmärchen in the German Romantic period. Like the Klingsohr
Märchen, Goethe’s tale portrays a world divided into separate realms that must be
united and brought into harmony in order to usher in a new golden age of peace,
beauty, and eternal youth. A motley cast of characters inhabits this whimsical
world, among them two will-o’-the-wisps, a pug dog, a canary, a hawk, a bumbling
giant, and a beautiful green serpent that moves freely and beneficently in all realms.
A river divides the universe of the tale in two; on the one bank of the river the
mundane lives of an old man and old woman proceed; the other side is home to a
beautiful Lily, lonely and ideal, whose touch is fatal. This river must be bridged, just
as a subterranean temple inhabited by four kings must be brought to light if the
world is to be rejuvenated and redeemed.
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A melancholy Knight who concludes his pilgrimage to the Lily by throwing
himself at her and seeking death in her touch initiates the tale’s narrative crisis.
Forming a magic circle around the Knight’s corpse, taking her tail in her mouth and
creating an ouroboros, hermetic symbol of eternal life, the green serpent, in overt
contrast to Judeo-Christian symbolism, is the agent of redemption in this tale. Her
reconciling role is akin to that of Fable in the Klingsohr cosmos. Instructed by the old
man, the Lily touches the snake with one hand and the Knight with the other,
bringing him back to life. The snake subsequently dissolves into a sea of precious
gemstones that are thrown into the river, precipitating the surfacing of the subterranean temple, with its four kings of gold, silver, iron, and alloy, representing wisdom,
light, power, and love respectively. A magnificent bridge rises out of the river from
foundations formed by the precious stones of the snake, resolving all tensions and
transcending divisions. Thousands of foot travelers traverse the river as complete
social harmony reigns:
The great roadway in the middle was alive with livestock and mules, riders and carts, all
of which seemed to stream past each other in both directions without any trouble at all.
Everyone marvelled at such ease and splendour and the new king and his bride [the
Knight and the Lily] were as delighted with the animation and activity before them as
they were with their mutual love. (Goethe 2000: 29)
True to what might be termed Goethe’s ‘‘Classicism’’ and to his ‘‘pagan’’ rejection of
Christian dualism, even the agent of destruction, the bumbling giant whose shadow
creates havoc among this stream of people on the bridge, is transformed and fixed to
the ground as a sundial, darkness thus coming to serve order and light. The fairy tales
of both Goethe and Novalis, in their abstract, universalizing combinations of the
social and the cosmic, offer, among other things, metaphysical responses to the
cataclysmic upheaval and violence represented by the French Revolution. In Novalis,
we find a celebration of the revolutionary, even apocalyptic, potential of poetry as
against reason, whereas in Goethe’s more conservative world, interdependence and
cooperation reign, there is a place for everything, and everything eventually finds or is
put in its place.
In contrast to the metaphysical and alchemical allegories/symbols of Goethe and
Novalis, Ludwig Tieck’s masterpiece in the Kunstmärchen genre, Blond Eckbert or
Eckbert the Fair (1797), offers a remarkable contribution to proto-Freudian depth
psychology as a study in narcissism, repetition compulsion, and the return of the
repressed. It is the story of a reclusive childless couple, the knight Eckbert and his
wife Bertha. Eckbert’s decision to ask his wife to share her strange life story with a
friend, Philipp Walther, represents his effort to escape self-absorption and isolation.
As Tieck writes,
There are times when it troubles a man to keep a secret from a friend, a secret which,
until then, had been guarded with the utmost care; his soul is overcome by an
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irresistible desire to confide completely, to bare its innermost emotions to that friend, so
that their friendship can become even closer. It might be the case, in such moments,
that those more tender souls will come to appreciate one another more, yet, sometimes,
it might also drive one party to shy away from acquaintance with the other. (Tieck
2000: 35-6)
Bertha’s narrative plays upon the prototypical fairy tale plot, at the same time that, in
an ironic gesture typical of the German Kunstmärchen, she explicitly warns her
listeners ‘‘not to take my story for a fairy tale, however strange it may sound’’
(Tieck 2000: 36). The child of quarrelsome, impoverished parents, Bertha is a clumsy
otherworldly child who is beaten by her father even as she dreams of instant riches
that she can then shower on her abusive parents. After running away from home, she
takes refuge in the woodland cottage of an uncanny old woman who teaches her how
to spin and to take care of her household animals, a dog and a magical bird that lays
eggs containing pearls and precious gems. When Bertha reaches 14, her witchlike
guardian praises her diligence and obedience, but also sets the innocent girl up for her
fall by warning her never ‘‘to stray from the true path: punishment will follow, no
matter how late’’ (Tieck 2000: 43). In her world of Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude),
the imaginative girl also learns to read, dreams of handsome knights, and realizes that
her dreams are within her reach if she dares to steal the magic bird and run away. Thus
Tieck’s self-conscious tale is an allegory of the Romantic movement itself, highlighting its awareness of the loss of innocence that inevitably results from the
knowledge gained through books. Without moralizing, Blond Eckbert further dramatizes, in its whirlpool-like plot, the dangers of absorption in the solitary imagination.
In telling her tale to Philipp Walther, Bertha also confesses to murder, for she
admits chaining and abandoning the dog to a certain death and then strangling the
magic bird when its obsessively repeated song becomes the voice of her guilty
conscience. Eckbert fulfills her fairy tale dreams of a handsome knight, but their
marriage turns out anything but happily ever after once Bertha has revealed her secret
past to their friend. Mysteriously, in bidding her good night, Walther refers to the
name of the dog she had abandoned, Strohmian, and she is filled with ‘‘unspeakable
terror’’ (Tieck 2000: 48) at the realization of his uncanny connection to her fate. Now
Eckbert’s only friend becomes a source of torment and threat. Eckbert kills him with a
crossbow when out hunting one day, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner shoots the
albatross, having taken aim at Walther unconsciously, ‘‘without knowing what he
was doing’’ (Tieck 2000: 48). Bertha simultaneously dies, and Eckbert is left alone,
prey, as was Bertha, to continual self-reproach. Eckbert is befriended by a young
knight named Hugo, only to have the same drama repeated. Compelled to confess his
crime to Hugo, Eckbert afterwards imagines that Hugo is none other than Walther
and he abandons forever ‘‘the notion of friendship, the desire for human contact’’
(Tieck 2000: 50).
Retreating into the woods, he rides aimlessly only to discover that he has retraced
exactly Bertha’s youthful journey. Face to face with the uncanny old woman, he learns
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that Walther and Hugo were merely products of her shape-shifting powers and that
Bertha his wife was actually his sister who had been removed from his family at birth
by a stepmother. The reader is compelled to question, along with Eckbert, the reality
of all that happens to him: ‘‘[A]t times, his life seemed more akin to a strange fairy
tale than reality, . . . and [h]e often felt that he must be insane and that everything was
simply a wild figment of his imagination’’ (Tieck 2000: 49, 50). Eckbert expires,
crazed by the realization of the ‘‘awful solitude’’ (Tieck 2000: 51) in which he has
lived his life and admitting that he had indeed always suspected some horrible secret
at the root of his melancholy marriage. In Blond Eckbert, Tieck creates an exemplary
embodiment of the uncanny described by Freud as a feeling both strange and familiar
produced by the surfacing of that which should have remained hidden. He also creates
a remarkable study of existential solitude as the ultimate reality, the profound secret
behind efforts at friendship and human communion. We recognize here the profoundly modern insights accorded the Kunstmärchen by virtue of its self-reflective
presentation of folkloric themes.
If Blond Eckbert is Tieck’s best-known tale, it is certainly not alone among his works
in its reliance on folkloric structures and motifs. In fact, folkloric motifs and narrative
structures are central to much of his work, from his early stories, Almansur (1790) and
Abdallah (1792) to his epistolary novel William Lovell (ca. 1795-6) up to the fairy tales
Der Runenberg (1801) and Die Elfen (1811). As if to acknowledge the centrality of the
fairy tale not just to his own oeuvre but to Romantic aesthetics as a whole, during the
years 1812-16, Tieck gathered together his earlier works in a frame novel, Phantasus
which was modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron and Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights
(1550-3), the first known collection of European fairy tales united by a frame
narrative. The Pleasant Nights features a group of exiled Milanese aristocrats seeking
to entertain themselves by recounting fairy tales to one another. Phantasus brings
together a group of landed gentry for the enjoyment of polite conversation and
Romantic Geselligkeit (sociability) in an elegant and relaxed country house setting.
The openness of this context allows room for the character Ernst’s proto-Freudian
forebodings of the troubling psychic sources of the Märchenhaft that might also be
said to constitute a compendium of Romantic literary modes – sublime, grotesque,
gothic, and fantastic:
It is not just on the deserted heights of Gotthard that our spirit is filled with
horror . . . even the most beautiful place has ghosts that stride through our heart, chasing
such strange forebodings, such confused shadows through our imaginations, that we flee
them and seek to lose ourselves in the hustle and bustle of the world. In this way, poems
and fairy tales come into being in our inner selves as we seek to populate the vast
emptiness, the terrible chaos with figures and to decorate the unpleasant room artistically; these pictures cannot then, however, deny the character of their creator. In these
natural fairy tales the lovable is mixed with the horrific, the strange with the childish,
such that our fantasy is perplexed to the point of poetic madness until this madness
itself is let loose and freed in our inner self. (Tieck 1985: 112-13; my translation)
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Phantasus contains not just Tieck’s haunting fictional reworkings of folkloric themes,
but also his plays based upon fairy tale motifs such as Bluebeard, Little Red Riding
Hood, and Puss in Boots, the latter an exuberant, comic celebration of the nonrational in
art and a farcical satire of contemporary theatrical tastes.
Just as Tieck had found Boccaccio and Straparola useful models, so Clemens
Brentano wrote to Achim von Arnim, his coeditor of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, in
December 1805 that he wanted to rework Basile’s Neapolitan fairy tales, the Pentameron (1634) into a collection for German children. In the years 1805-17, Brentano
completed 15 fairy tales and began four others. Eight of these completed tales were
based upon motifs from the Pentameron and were woven together with a (fragmentary)
frame tale entitled ‘‘The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales.’’ The rest of the tales feature motifs
from the Rhine region and were gathered together in a collection that was also to
remain incomplete. Indeed, Brentano showed no real concern for the publication of
his tales and later denounced them as frivolous and sinful after his conversion to
Catholicism. With his permission, they were finally published posthumously in
1846-7. In contrast to Novalis’s metaphysical daring and Tieck’s psychological
depth, Brentano’s tales resist analysis in their insistently performative quality and,
as Marianne Thalmann has suggested, are reminiscent of commedia dell’arte and Punch
and Judy shows.2 His tales are further distinguished by their musicality, richness of
wordplay, and the quirkiness of their humor which features comminglings of animal
and human, nature and culture, chaos and order that border on what we would now
term the absurd.
If Straparola and Basile were important models for Tieck and Brentano respectively
in creating the frame tales for their Märchen, perhaps the most influential frame tale of
all was The Thousand and One Nights, translated into French by Antoine Galland,
published in 10 volumes between 1704 and 1717, and immediately disseminated
throughout Europe. This literary historical fact helps explain the Orientalizing
undercurrent that runs through so many Romantic fairy tales from Novalis’s Klingsohr tale that identifies the imagination with Ginnistan (Hindostan) to the presence
of the Bhagavad-Gita and hieroglyphics in Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Thus Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder’s A Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint (1797), the
most obvious example of the Romantic Kunstmärchen’s Orientalism opens: ‘‘The
Orient is the home of all that is marvelous. In the ancient childlike views prevailing
there, one finds strange signs and riddles still unsolved by Reason which considers
itself so much more clever. Thus, for example, one often finds strange creatures living
in the desert whom we would call mad, but who are there revered as supernatural
beings’’ (Wackenroder 1983: 47). This ‘‘naked saint,’’ a figure of Romantic madness
and alienation, feels himself chained to a turning wheel in order to ensure the passage
of time; in the end he is freed and transcends time itself by giving himself up to the
spirit of music and love.
Despite their significant differences, the fairy tales of Goethe, Novalis, Tieck,
Wackenroder, and Brentano have one notable trait in common – the universality
and ahistoricity of their settings that align them with the ‘‘once upon a time’’ of the
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traditional folk fairy tale. With the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, on the other hand,
the Romantic fairy tale takes a step into the very specific social world of bourgeois
nineteenth-century Germany. Indeed it is the tension between the magical and the
mundane, the poetic and prosaic, the artistic and the worldly, the supernatural and the
rational that forms the heart of Hoffmann’s oeuvre. The richness of Hoffmann’s
imagination – his psychological perspicacity combined with a devastating sense of
social satire, his compelling plots offset by vibrant symbolism – has rendered him the
best-known and most influential of the practitioners of the Romantic Kunstmärchen. In
France, Nodier, Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, Balzac, Dumas, and Sand all admired
him enormously and owe him a great debt. In Russia the same can be said of
Dostoevsky and Gogol. Carlyle’s English translations of Hoffmann likely influenced
Dickens. And the work of Poe and Hawthorne, from Murders in the Rue Morgue to
Rappaccini’s Daughter, is inconceivable without him, though the often unrecognized
importance of Tieck’s influence on these two American writers should also be
acknowledged.
Folkloric and fairy-tale motifs abound in all of Hoffmann’s works. In his most
famous tale, The Sandman, the central literary example in Freud’s essay on The
Uncanny, for example, we read of the main character’s sadistic nursemaid’s version of
the well-known bedtime story for children in which the Sandman throws sand into
the eyes of naughty children so that their eyes will spring out of their heads and can be
fed to his owl-like children. Hoffmann explicitly termed seven of his stories Märchen,
presumably because of the preponderance of marvelous or supernatural elements in
them and because of their tendency toward the happy endings that predominate in
fairy tales: The Golden Pot (1814), The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), The
Strange Child (1817), Little Zachary Named Cinnabar (1818), Princess Brambilla (1820),
The King’s Bride (1820), and Master Flea (1822).
The Golden Pot, subtitled A Modern Fairy Tale and often considered to be Hoffmann’s masterpiece in the Kunstmärchen genre, tells the tale of Anselmus, an unworldly and bungling student from Dresden, torn between his ambitions for a court
councilor position and his longing for a realm of poetry and ideal beauty, between his
attraction for a lively, flesh and blood woman named Veronica and the seductions of a
gold-green snake named Serpentina. The text is divided into 12 sections entitled
‘‘vigils,’’ as if to suggest that both the intrusive, tormented narrator and the reader are
engaged in night watches of a dreamlike spirit world. In fact, as in many Hoffmann
tales, the epistemological status of the perceptions of the main character is perhaps the
central theme of the text, as the narrator makes clear:
Gentle reader, make an effort while you are in the fairy region full of glorious marvels,
where both the highest rapture and deepest horror may be evoked, where the earnest
goddess herself lifts her veil so that we think we see her face, but a smile often glimmers
beneath her glance, a playful teasing smile that enchants us just as that of a mother
playing with her dearest children. While you are in this region that is revealed to us in
dreams at least, try, gentle reader, to recognize the familiar shapes which hover around
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you in the ordinary world. Then you will discover that this glorious kingdom is much
closer to you than you ever imagined. It is this kingdom which I now strive with all my
heart to reveal to you through the extraordinary story of Anselmus. (Hoffmann 1969:
32-3)
This fairy region, governed by the principles of alchemy and theosophy, is inhabited
by a spirit named Phosphorous and his fire lily bride; their union produces the spark
of thought and a fall from innocence that is ultimately repeated in the next generation
when Serpentina’s father, the archivist Lindhorst, an elemental fire spirit or salamander, is exiled to earth for marrying a snake against the will of Phosphorous, now the
spirit realm’s ruler. Lindhorst allows Anselmus access to this kingdom of dreams
through his greenhouse/library/archive. Here in this room of azure and emerald
reverberating with the sounds of birdsongs and crystal bells, it is Anselmus’s task
to copy perfectly a hieroglyphic, Orientalist manuscript, a book of nature found rolled
up in the leaves of exotic palm trees.
If Lindhorst can marry off his three serpent daughters by finding for them youths of
‘‘childlike poetic nature’’ (Hoffmann 1969: 67) who understand their songs and
believe in ‘‘the marvels of nature,’’ or rather, in their own ‘‘existence amid these
marvels’’ (Hoffmann 1969: 66), then he will be allowed to return home to Atlantis,
the realm of the marvelous, accompanied by his son-in-law Anselmus. This tension
between the everyday and the marvelous, the poetic and the prosaic, brings Anselmus
to the brink of madness and nervous breakdown as he imagines himself imprisoned in
a glass bottle that distorts his vision as punishment for spilling a blot of ink on the
sacred document. In an effort to wrest Anselmus from the power of the salamander
and the seductions of Serpentina, Veronica enlists the help of the witch Frau Rauerin,
an earth spirit and the female counterpart of the archivist Lindhorst. Meanwhile
Veronica’s rationalist father fears that Anselmus is perpetually drunk or crazy and ends
up himself succumbing to the effects of a steaming bowl of hot punch. In the end,
Anselmus remains true to his ideals and is rewarded with the love of Serpentina and
entrance into Atlantis, the Kingdom of Marvels. Veronica marries Registrar Heerbrand, who all along has clearly functioned as Anselmus’s double, and lives happily
ever after as Frau Court Councilor Heerbrand. The tale’s conclusion, then, is read
alternatively as recording Anselmus’s suicide by drowning when, succumbing to
madness, he throws himself into the glassy mirror of the waters of the Elbe, or as
the resolution of the conflicts between the mundane and the ideal through poetry. The
final sentence of The Golden Pot strongly supports the latter interpretation: ‘‘Is the
bliss of Anselmus anything else but life in poetry, poetry where the sacred harmony of
all things is revealed as the most profound secret of Nature?’’ (Hoffmann 1969: 92).
Hoffmann’s work, then, represents a culmination of the Kunstmärchen as an art form;
The Golden Pot encompasses Brentano’s whimsy and musicality, the psychological
depth of Tieck and the metaphysical and cosmological daring of Novalis.
The most significant French practitioner of the Romantic-era conte de fée, Charles
Nodier, was inspired by the work of Hoffmann as well as that of Goethe, Tieck, and
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Arnim. In the preface to his best known and best loved tale, La Fée aux miettes (1832),
Nodier evokes the charms of the tale-telling gifts of a Jura village patriarch, only to
assert ultimately that in the current age of skepticism, authors must place their
fantastic tales in the mouth of a lunatic if they are to gain the requisite credence.
Accordingly, Michel, the hero of La Fée aux miettes, is a naı̈ve carpenter whom the
narrator finds in a Glasgow lunatic asylum. Michel is in search of a magical mandrake
root that sings. In the epilogue we learn of Michel’s grotesque fairy friend’s connection
to the singing mandrake; she eventually frees him from the asylum to marry her
double, his ideal love, Belkiss, the Queen of Sheba, widow of King Solomon. (We see
here once again the significance of Galland’s Thousand and One Nights, for which
Nodier wrote a preface in 1822 as well as the presence of Freemasonic lore, so
prominent in both French and German Romanticism.) Finally, as in The Golden Pot,
the aim of Nodier’s tale is to reveal poetry’s ability to reveal the inseparability of
earthly and heavenly, mundane and magical worlds and the loves that inhabit them.
Half-forgotten Dreams and Elemental Spirits: Legacies of the
Romantic Fairy Tale
After Hoffmann, fairy tale motifs and structures migrate increasingly into other genres
beyond the Kunstmärchen per se – lyric and narrative poetry, drama, essay, novella, and
short story. The sense of melancholy longing for an irretrievable past is also heightened,
as we witness in Heinrich Heine’s famous Lorelei lyric from ‘‘Die Heimkehr’’ (1823-4),
about a beautiful siren whose singing lures sailors to their death:
Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Daß ich so traurig bin;
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,
Und ruhig fließt der Rhein;
Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt
Im Abendsonnenschein.
Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr goldnes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kammt ihr goldenes Haar.
Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme,
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewaltige Melodei.
Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
The Romantic Fairy Tale
151
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh.
Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn;
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
Die Lorelei getan. (Heine 1969, I: 129-30)
Whereas the practitioners of the Kunstmärchen are fascinated with self-conscious
development of experimental techniques and mechanisms to capture and illuminate
the naı̈ve, Heine above all else mourns its loss here. Identifying himself as a wild or
crazed child seeking to conquer his fear of the dark through the recitation of folk
songs, the poet’s persona also reveals the desire for the naı̈ve to be inseparable from a
longing for a culturally repressed feminine that inevitably takes its revenge.
In a lighter and more humorous vein, Heine’s essays Elementargeister (1835-6) and
Die Götter im Exil (1853) manifest his appreciation for folklore as a vehicle for
keeping alive the Germanic myth and Greco-Roman paganism that were demonized
by the advent of Christianity. These essays have an ironic charm unique to Heine in
the manner that their tongue-in-cheek representations and descriptions of mythical
beings and elemental spirits matter of factly assert their unequivocal reality. Elementargeister begins by evoking the oral transmission from generation to generation of
Germanic folklore as the lifeblood of German literature: ‘‘In Westphalia, the former
Saxony, not everything that is buried is dead. When one walks through the ancient
oak groves there, one hears the voices of olden times; one hears the echo of profound
magic spells, in which more abundance of life flows than in all of Mark Brandenburg’’ (Heine 1969, III: 523; my translation). The spirit of Germanic folklore takes
the form, for Heine, of an old woman buried alive by Saxon forces in their flight
from Charlemagne’s troops: ‘‘People say that the old woman still lives. Not everything that is buried in Westphalia is dead’’ (Heine 1969, III: 523; my translation).
Once again for Heine, as with his Lorelei, the folkloric world is strongly associated
with a female realm excluded from and perceived as threatening by official Christian
dogma. Accordingly, many of the elemental spirits evoked by Heine are feminine:
undines, melusines, and nixes (water), elves and willis (earth), and swan maidens
(air). Heine’s haunting remarks about these swan maidens who remove their feathered gowns to bathe, revealing and making themselves vulnerable as women, typify
his stance in these essays. ‘‘Here we find traces of the oldest life of magic. Here are
the sounds of Nordic paganism, that, like half forgotten dreams, find wonderful
resonance in our memories’’ (Heine 1969, III: 538; my translation). For Heine, the
female flight of these maidens was originally something remarkable and worthy;
Christianity sullied and corrupted it into the flight of repugnant witches on
broomsticks.
These female elemental spirits – water spirits or undines in particular – based in
the lore of Paracelsus’s Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris
spiritibus (1591), are a rich source of inspiration for a wide variety of Romantic literary
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genres. Huguenot Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811) transforms the
Melusine of chapbook legend and of Jean d’Arras’s 1387 prose romance into one of
the most enduring and influential of the German Kunstmärchen. The Golden Pot was
begun the year Hoffmann completed his opera Undine (1813) for which Fouqué wrote
the libretto, and Hoffmann’s Serpentina is clearly a kindred spirit of Melusine/
Undine. Fouqué’s Undine tells the tale of a water spirit who can gain a soul only by
marrying a human being and gaining his unconditional love. Undine does indeed
capture the heart of the knight Huldbrand and marry him, thus acquiring a soul and
with it the capacity to suffer love and to shed tears – a sacred sign of her humanity.
Then Bertalda, the adopted daughter of a noble family who was in fact exchanged
with Undine at birth, such that the heroine was raised by the humble fisher folk who
are Bertalda’s true parents, moves in with the newly married couple. Eventually,
Huldbrand turns from Undine to Bertalda, alienated and intimidated by Undine’s
preternatural powers and her familial links with the world of elemental spirits.
Huldbrand’s betrayal forces Undine to return to her natural element and compels
her against her will to wreak vengeance upon him according to the laws of her watery
world; on the night of his wedding with Bertalda, she drowns him with her tears.
Through his narrator, Fouqué gives us the ostensible message of his novella in his
moralizing critique of fairy-tale wish fulfillment: ‘‘That treacherous power which
lurks, waiting to destroy us, takes pleasure in singing its intended victims to sleep
with sweet songs and golden fairy tales. In contrast, the messenger sent from Heaven
to save us often knocks loudly and frighteningly at our door’’ (Fouqué 2000: 113).
Perhaps the strongest ‘‘message’’ that Undine conveys to a twenty-first-century reader
is the necessity to honor the powers of nature as they are embodied in its heroine.
Indeed reader sympathy lies entirely with Undine rather than Huldbrand or Bertalda,
implying perhaps unconscious protofeminism on the part of Fouqué who clearly
emphasizes the fascination of the woman who transgresses the bounds of culturally
constructed femininity in the naturalness of her passion as well as highlighting the
tragic consequences of the Christian soul/body split and of the ethic of compulsory
female self-sacrifice. Certainly, Germaine de Staël interpreted the undine motif in this
feminist fashion, for her Corinne, or Italy (1807), the prototypical and enormously
influential nineteenth-century novel of the female artist, abandoned by her lover
because of her socially transgressive genius, was inspired by an 1804 performance in
Weimar of an earlier theatrical version of the legend, the Hensler opera The Nymph of
the Danube (Balayé 1979: 107).
The Melusine of Letitia Landon’s narrative poem The Fairy of the Fountains (1835),
undoubtedly influenced by Staël’s Corinne, is also clearly an emblem of female sexual
and artistic power. The protofeminism of Landon’s Melusine is hardly surprising if we
acknowledge in her prefatory remarks to the poem a particularly keen awareness of the
historical and cultural specificity of a given variation on a fairy tale motif: ‘‘I have
allowed myself some license, in my arrangement of the story: but fairy tales have an
old-established privilege of change; at least, if we judge by the various shapes which
they assume in the progress of time, and by process of translation’’ (Landon 1997:
The Romantic Fairy Tale
153
225). Along with her mother, Landon’s Melusine has been exiled from her rightful
kingdom because of her father’s transgression of the boundaries of her mother’s world;
entering her mother’s fairy realm without her permission, he sought out her ‘‘secret
bower’’ and listened ‘‘to the word / Mortal ear hath never heard’’ (Landon 1997: 228).
Avenging her mother’s wrong, Melusine employs her own magical powers to bind her
father in an enchanted sleep and inter him in a mountain cave. Upon learning of
Melusine’s deed, her mother banishes her, in a kind of intergenerational repetition
compulsion, and curses her such that every seventh day she is transformed into a snake
from the waist down. Once she marries, the cycle is repeated, as her husband
Raymond breaks the marital taboo, seeks her out in her fountain cave and discovers
her serpentine form, dooming them both to separation and despair: ‘‘Hope and
happiness are o’er, / They can meet on earth no more’’ (Landon 1997: 241). In Jean
d’Arras’s original prose poem, it is the secret of women’s biological creativity that
must be kept from men; the father/husband is forbidden to visit the mother during
her lyings-in and her subsequent preparation of her children to enter life. In Landon’s
poem, Melusine’s magical lineage is that of the female poet, for it is the father’s
eavesdropping on the mother’s ‘‘more than mortal’’ words that brings doom upon all
involved. The mother clearly recognizes her daughter’s ‘‘fairy power’’ as the power of
the imagination that distinguishes the socially ostracized woman poet:
And she marked her daughter’s eyes
Fix’d upon the glad sunrise,
With a sad yet eager look,
Such as fixes on a book
Which describes some happy lot,
Lit with joys that we have not.
And the thought of what has been,
And the thought of what might be,
Makes us crave the fancied scene,
And despise reality.
‘Twas a drear and desert plain
Lay around their sad domain;
But, far off, a world more fair
Outlined on the sunny air;
Hung amid the purple clouds,
With which early morning shrouds
All her blushes, brief and bright,
Waking up from sleep and night. (Landon 1997: 228)
Melusine’s serpentine form furthermore links her to the Geraldine of Coleridge’s
Christabel and Keats’s Lamia as female embodiments of the seductive and treacherous
powers of the imagination.
In the most renowned version of the undine/melusine legend, Hans Christian
Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837), the mermaid comes to represent the feminized
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Romantic poet who loses his voice and cannot be understood or appreciated by the
world of the nineteenth-century bourgeois philistine. In Andersen’s version of the
tale, both excruciatingly sentimental and searingly brutal, the mermaid once again
longs for the chance to marry the handsome prince and gain an immortal soul. Her
tail must be cut in two to form human legs, but she will never walk on earth without
pain. As the witch who grants her the transformation explains: ‘‘every step you take
will be like treading on a sharp knife’’ (Andersen 1983: 60). Similarly, she must give
up her beautiful voice when the witch extracts her tongue as payment for her services.
Unable to speak, she cannot tell the prince that it is she who has saved his life; he
mistakenly believes it is a mortal woman, whom he then marries. Unlike Fouqué’s
Undine, however, Andersen’s mermaid transcends the laws of her watery world and
refuses to kill the prince, though the act would free her to return to her beautiful
ocean realm. In the tale’s Christianized conclusion, she is raised to the level of the
spirits of the air who do not need the love of a human to become immortal. She will
bring relief and healing to humankind with her cooling breezes and, after three
hundred years of goodness, will ‘‘gain an immortal soul and eternal happiness’’
(Andersen 1983: 71). In Andersen’s little mermaid we recognize the Romantic artist,
sympathetic with and in tune with nature, having appropriated its traditionally
feminine valence, but out of his element in human society. We also see, as in
Andersen’s The Nightingale (1843) the working-class or peasant poet as voice not
just of nature but also of socioeconomic groups marginalized, taken for granted, and
even exploited by the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, as Andersen experienced his
relations with his patrons, Jonas Collin and his son Edvard (Zipes 1999: 82-5).
The figure of the undine or mermaid is one of the most enduring legacies of the
Romantic fairy tale to later literature. The late French Romantic Gérard de Nerval
finds her in the heroine of Octavia from Daughters of Fire (1854). Called away from
Paris by ‘‘an enchanting voice, a siren’s song’’ (Nerval 1999: 197), the world-weary
narrative persona finds Octavia at the bay of Marseilles. This water nymph, ‘‘an
English girl, her lithe body slicing through the green water at my side’’ (Nerval
1999: 197), presents him triumphantly with a fish she has caught in her bare white
hands. Years later, he meets up with her in Naples, her freedom and beauty sacrificed
to the care of a paralytic, insanely jealous husband and an invalid father. Once again
we see here a haunting female power trapped or violated by a threatened masculinity.
In contemporary culture, the undine figure continues to thrive in modern fairy tales
from Jane Yolen’s The River Maid (1982), a tale of revenge by a water maiden for her
imprisonment and rape by an arrogant farmer who dares to move a riverbed, to
Disney’s The Little Mermaid, A. S. Byatt’s immensely popular academic fairy tale
Possession (1990), Carol Goodman’s recent murder mystery The Seduction of Water
(2003), and John Sayles’s film The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).
Though the Kunstmärchen experiences a revival in Victorian and late nineteenthcentury Britain and America with the writings of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde,
Christina Rossetti, and Frances Hodgson Burnett and again in the latter half of the
twentieth century in the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter, Ursula LeGuin, Anne
The Romantic Fairy Tale
155
Sexton, and Olga Broumas who reclaim and rewrite the Romantic association of
women, nature, and the nonrational, never again is the genre marked by such a clear
effort to celebrate and replicate, at a self-conscious level, the naı̈ve, folkloric voice.3
Hans Christian Andersen acknowledges the futility of this search for the natural and
naı̈ve in his A Rose from the Grave of Homer, a brief allegory that serves as a moving and
merciless critique of European Romanticism and of his own work in particular. This
rose grows from the soil on Homer’s grave, soil nourished by the dead bodies of
nightingales who die from unrequited love for her, just as the striving, suffering, and
melancholy of sentimental poets nurtures the myth of the naı̈ve. Echoing the familiar,
indeed by then outworn, classic/Romantic, North/South taxonomy inherited from
Staël and A. W. Schlegel, Andersen continues, ‘‘a singer from the North, the home of
clouds and of the Northern light’’ (Andersen 1983: 292), plucks this rose growing on
Homer’s grave and takes it home. ‘‘Like a mummy the flower corpse now rests in his
Iliad, and, as in a dream, she hears him open the book and say, ‘Here is a rose from the
grave of Homer’ ’’ (Andersen 1983: 293). Though Andersen would seem to announce
the inevitable sterility of this Romantic search for the ‘‘pure’’ art of storytelling found
in the collective voice, Walter Benjamin rekindles this longing in his influential and
eloquent essay on ‘‘The Storyteller’’ ([1936] 1969) which opens by proclaiming the
death of the art of storytelling. Such nostalgia in one of Europe’s most clear-sighted
and prescient twentieth-century critics suggests that the legacy of the European
Kunstmärchen remains a powerful one and that even today the genre is far from extinct.
Notes
1 Ellis writes, ‘‘[T]he Grimms deliberately deceived their public by concealing or actually
misstating the facts, in order to give an impression of ancient German folk origin for
their material which they knew was utterly
false’’ (Ellis 1983: 36).
2 According to Thalmann, ‘‘Brentanos Märchen
ist kein Weltanschauungsmärchen mehr, es ist
auf das Kasperletheater gestellt . . . ’’ (Brenta-
no’s fairy tales no longer seek to represent a
worldview; they are like a Punch and Judy
show. . . ; Thalmann 1961: 65, my translation).
3 For a fascinating Romantic precursor to these
feminist fairy tales, see Bettine Brentano von
Arnim’s Der Königssohn, written in 1808 but
not published until 1913, and English translation (1990).
References and Further Reading
Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism –
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Andersen, Hans Christian (1983). The Complete
Illustrated Stories, trans. H. W. Dulcken. London: Chancellor.
Arnim, Achim von (1992). Schriften. Werke in Sechs
Bänden, ed. Roswitha Burwick, Jürgen Knaack,
and Hermann F. Weiss, vol. 6. Frankfurt am
Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Balayé, Simone (1979). Madame de Staël: Lumières
et liberté. Paris: Klincksieck.
156
Kari Lokke
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.’’ In
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 83-109.
Brentano, Clemens (2000). ‘‘Tale of Honest Casper
and Fair Annie.’’ In Carol Tully (ed. and trans.),
Romantic Fairy Tales. London: Penguin, pp. 12759.
Dai Sijie (2001). Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, trans. Ina Rilke. New York: Knopf.
Ellis, John M. (1983). One Fairy Story Too Many.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte (2000). ‘‘Undine.’’
In Carol Tully (ed. and trans.), Romantic Fairy
Tales. London: Penguin, pp. 53-125.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (2000). ‘‘The Fairy
Tale.’’ In Carol Tully (ed. and trans.), Romantic
Fairy Tales. London: Penguin, pp. 1-32.
Heine, Heinrich (1969). Sämtliche Werke, ed. Werner Vortriede, 4 vols. München: Winkler Verlag.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1993). Schriften zur
Ästhetik und Literatur, 1767-1781. Werke, ed.
Gunter E. Grimm, vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1969). Tales
of E .T. A. Hoffmann, ed. and trans. Leonard
J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Jauss, Hans Robert (1970). Literaturgeschichte als
Provocation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1997). Selected Writings,
ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
Nerval, Gérard de (1999). Selected Writings, ed. and
trans. Richard Sieburth. London: Penguin.
Nodier, Charles (1961). Contes, ed. Pierre-Georges
Castex. Paris: Garnier.
Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg) (1960). Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn
and Richard Samuel, 4 vols. Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer Verlag.
Novalis. (1964). Henry von Ofterdingen, ed. and
trans. Palmer Hilty. New York: Frederick
Ungar.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1990). The First and Second Discourses and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch. New
York: Harper and Row.
Schiller, Friedrich (1966). Naı̈ve and Sentimental
Poetry and On the Sublime, ed. and trans. Julias
Elias. New York: Ungar.
Sychrava, Juliet (1989). Schiller to Derrida: Idealism
in Aesthetics. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Tatar, Maria (2003). The Hard Facts of the Grimms’
Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thalmann, Marianne (1961). Das Märchen und die
Moderne. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.
Tieck, Ludwig (1985). Phantasus. Schriften, ed.
Manfred Frank, vol. 6. Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Tieck, Ludwig (2000). ‘‘Eckbert the Fair.’’ In Carol
Tully (ed. and trans.), Romantic Fairy Tales.
London: Penguin, pp. 35-51.
von Arnim, Bettina (1913). ‘‘Der Königssohn.’’
Westermanns Monatshefte, 113: 554-8.
von Arnim, Bettina (1990). ‘‘The Queen’s Son.’’ In
Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700
to 1830, ed. and trans. Jeannine Blackwell and
Susanne Zantop. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 450-4.
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich (1983). ‘‘A
Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked
Saint.’’ In Frank G. Ryder and Robert M.
Browning (eds.), German Literary Fairy Tales,
trans. R. M. Browning. New York: Continuum,
pp. 47-51.
Zipes, Jack (1999). When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York
and London: Routledge.
9
German Romantic Drama
Frederick Burwick
Although scorned as ‘‘sickly and stupid’’ by William Wordsworth in his Preface
(1800) to the Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth 1974, 1: 128), German tragedies attracted
huge audiences in London. The influence of German drama on the British stage
increased in the 1780s, and by the end of the 1790s, as noted by Allardyce Nicoll,
‘‘the enthusiasm for the drama of Kotzebue and his companions’’ had risen to a height
of popularity (Nicoll 1927: 66, quoted in Wordsworth 1974: 172n.). Although many
German plays were adapted for the British stage, there was little interest in the
‘‘destiny drama’’ (Schicksalstragödie) that enjoyed a decade of popularity in Germany
early in the nineteenth century. Best exemplified in Zacharias Werner’s The Twentyfourth of February (1806; Der vierundzwanzigste Februar), these plays depicted a character compelled by a malignant destiny to commit a horrible crime. The concept of
fate from classical Greek drama was redefined in terms of contemporary notions of
nature, nurture, and familial pathology. Extremely popular, however, were the plays of
August von Kotzebue, with more than 20 adaptations performed on the London stage
between 1796 and 1801. Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue (1789), translated by
Benjamin Thompson as The Stranger (1798), starred Sarah Siddons in the role of
Mrs Haller and John Phillip Kemble in the title-role of the Stranger. Sarah Siddons
also played Elvira, the conqueror’s mistress, opposite Kemble’s Rolla, the Peruvian
hero in Pizarro (1799), adapted by Richard Brinsley Sheridan from Kotzebue’s Die
Spanier in Peru. Among Kotzebue’s comedies, Kind der Liebe was adapted by Elizabeth
Inchbald as Lovers’ Vows (1798). For Wordsworth, ‘‘sickly and stupid’’ apparently
referred to the sentimentalism. William Hazlitt, however, ranked Kemble’s performance as the Stranger superior to his Shakespearean roles.1
As Charles Shadduck suggests, there may be something underhanded in such high
praise: ‘‘The cunningest trick available to the theater critic who wants to cut an actor
down to size is to bypass his efforts in the great test roles – Macbeth or Hamlet – and
praise him unstintingly in some role which is rather less than first-class’’ (Shattuck
1974, 11: i). On the other hand, the applause of the critics for the performances of
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Frederick Burwick
Kotzebue’s plays drowns out those who grumble that they are ‘‘sickly and stupid.’’
Wordsworth, who read with enthusiasm Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber when Alexander Fraser Tytler’s translation appeared in 1797, readily appropriated many of its
dramatic elements into the completion of his The Borderers (Wordsworth 1982).2
Wordsworth may well have been introduced to Schiller’s play by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, who was drawing from it even more liberally in his composition of Osorio
(1797), later modified as Remorse (1813). In terms of style and complexity of character,
one may grant Schiller a literary achievement greater than Kotzebue, but to discriminate between high and low culture does not work well either for the immediate or for
the subsequent reception. Kotzebue’s plays, especially his comedies, remained popular
throughout the nineteenth century; his librettos, set to music by Ludwig van
Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Carl Maria von Weber, continue to enjoy frequent
revival.
Storm and Stress, Destiny Drama
When first performed, Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781) impressed its critics as an assault
upon the establishment driven by the rebellious tendencies of the Sturm und Drang
movement. In leading his renegade band against the tyrannical rule of his brother,
Karl Moor finds himself defeated by his own choices, his rebellion doomed to futility.
A key word in the play is ‘‘despair’’ (Verzweiflung), repeated 17 times in the play, seven
times by the old Count Moor in his self-recrimination for having denounced his son.
‘‘My curse drove him into death! He fell into despair!’’ (Mein Fluch ihn gejagt in
den Tod! gefallen in Verzweiflung!) The words of the old Count are also echoed by
Karl, by his wicked brother Franz, and by the loyal soldier Hermann. It is not the
heroic Karl, but the villainous Franz who denounces the value of life and the immortal
soul:
Ich habs immer gelesen, daß unser Wesen nichts ist als Sprung des Geblüts, und mit
dem letzten Blutstropfen zerrinnt auch Geist und Gedanke. Er macht alle Schwachheiten des Körpers mit, wird er nicht auch aufhören bei seiner Zerstörung? nicht bei seiner
Fäulung verdampfen? Laß einen Wassertropfen in deinem Gehirne verirren, und dein
Leben macht eine plötzliche Pause, die zunächst an das Nichtsein grenzt, und ihre
Fortdauer ist der Tod. Empfindung ist Schwingung einiger Saiten, und das zerschlagene
Klavier tönet nicht mehr.
(I have always read that our whole body is nothing more than a blood-spring, and that,
with its last drop, mind and thought dissolve into nothing. They share all the
infirmities of the body; why, then, should they not cease with its dissolution? Why
not evaporate in its decomposition? Let a drop of water stray into your brain, and life
makes a sudden pause, which borders on nonexistence, and this pause continued is
death. Sensation is the vibration of a few chords, which, when the instrument is broken,
cease to sound.) (Schiller Die Räuber, Act V, scene i)3
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Pastor Moser tells Franz that this is the ‘‘philosophy of your despair,’’ and as the
tragedy comes to a close he accuses Franz for have purchased his brief triumph with
‘‘infinite despair.’’
In his historical drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
turned to the time of the Peasants’ Rebellion (1524-6). Götz may have been an
unlikely hero, but Goethe transformed him from the robber-baron who plundered
traveling merchants into a defiant champion of freedom and leader of the peasants in
the war against oppressive tyrants. Goethe gains sympathy for his hero by contrasting
his loyalty to his soldiers with the betrayal and villainy of the former friend of his
youth, Adelbert von Weislingen. Weislingen falls in love with Götz’s sister Maria and
they are engaged. When Weislingen returns to the court of the Bishop of Bamberg,
however, he is seduced by Adelheid, who persuades him to abandon Maria, betray
Götz, and send the Kaiser’s troops against him. The moving forces in this play are
oppression versus freedom, betrayal versus loyalty. With their last bottle of wine,
Götz proposes a toast, ‘‘Long live the Kaiser!’’ His comrades echo the toast. And what
would be their final toast, Götz asks, when their life’s blood should flow away and
only the last precious drop should remain in their cup. They answer: ‘‘Long live
freedom!’’ Götz’s very identity is in that freedom. When his wife visits him imprisoned in the tower, he tells her that she seeks him in vain, for Götz is no more: ‘‘They
have mutilated me piece by piece: my hand, my freedom, my lands, my good name.
My head? what does it matter.’’ The betrayer is also betrayed. The final drop in the
cup for Weislingen is poison administered by Adelheid, who wants him out of the
way so that she can pursue a liaison with the future Kaiser. At the play’s end, Götz’s
dying words are ‘‘Freedom! Freedom!’’
As Edgar Johnson observed in commenting on Sir Walter Scott’s translation of Götz
von Berlichingen, published in 1799, ‘‘the significance of Scott’s labor . . . is not what he
did for Goethe, but what Goethe did for him’’ (Johnson 1970, I: 165). Goethe’s use of
history, a subtle superimposition of the past on the present, anticipated and directed
Scott’s use of history in the Waverley novels. Even after the initial popularity of the
Sturm und Drang movement had passed, the theme of revolt against oppression persisted
in German drama throughout the Romantic period. Writing at the time of the French
occupation of Germany, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804) celebrated the oath of the Swiss
confederates on the Rütli, swearing to overthrow the Habsburg occupation at the
beginning of the fourteenth century. Two historical events in 1803 influenced Schiller’s
composition of Wilhelm Tell: the French troops completed their occupation of Hannover
and the Act of Mediation restored independence to the Swiss Cantons. ‘‘When will the
savior of this land come?’’ asks the fisherman Ruodi at the close of Act I, scene i. That
Tell is the ‘‘Savior’’ (Retter) is soon acknowledged by both the Habsburg Bailiff Gessler
and the Schwyzer citizen Stauffaucher. Gessler, of course, gives him that title ironically –
‘‘Savior, save yourself!’’ – when he commands Tell to shoot the apple from his son’s head.
For Schiller, freedom is exemplified through acts of humane kindness and charity, in
contrast to the selfish and ruthless acts of the tyrannical despots.
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In the 1830s, when liberal factions seeking constitutional reform were caught up in
rivalry amongst themselves, Georg Büchner in Dantons Tod (1836) dramatized the
Gerondist–Jacobin conflict of the 1790s. Writing at the end of the Romantic period,
Büchner appropriates and redefines many trends and motifs of the earlier generation.
He considered the once popular ‘‘destiny’’ drama (Schicksalstragödie) naı̈ve and he
parodied its pretensions in the dialogue that closes Act II, scene ii. Two gentlemen
are strolling the promenade. One has been expounding the wonders of man’s technical
genius: ‘‘Humanity hastens with giant steps toward its lofty destination.’’ This
ecstatic millennialism reminds the other of a new play he has just seen: ‘‘A Babylonian
tower, a maze of arches, staircases, passages, and all so lightly and boldly blown to
bits.’’ He recalls nothing of the human events, only the architectural grandeur and
explosive stage effects. The mere recollection of the illusion, however, so overwhelms
the speaker that he mistrusts the reality of the terra firma: ‘‘One becomes dizzier with
every step, the head spins.’’ He staggers and clutches his companion’s hand: ‘‘Yes, the
earth has a thin crust. I always imagine that I could fall through wherever there’s a
hole. One must walk carefully in order not to break through. But go to the theater, I
recommend it’’ (II. ii). Not merely comic relief, this scene reflects the major motif –
‘‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.’’ Büchner does
not resort idly to the Shakespearean trope, he uses it to transform Schicksalstragödie
into an existential impasse. Not just as players upon the stage, as Danton’s friend
Camille observes in the scene that follows, humanity is condemned to play as wooden
marionettes in a puppet theater (II. iii). Büchner argues that the playwright is a
historian whose task it is to re-enact with fidelity the events of history, but he also
confesses that that his study of the French Revolution left him feeling ‘‘destroyed by
the terrible fatalism of history,’’ where action is but ‘‘a puppet theater, a ridiculous
struggle against brazen law, which we might possibly recognize but never command’’
(Büchner to Minna Jaegle, after 10 March 1834, in Büchner [1813-37] 1992-9, II:
425-6).
In Dantons Tod, Büchner radically redefined the earlier ‘‘destiny’’ drama, combining
it with the fiabesque implications of his puppet metaphor. The fiabesque (from the
Italian folk tales, the fiabe) had been imported onto the German stage with the revival
of the commedia dell’arte, and Büchner used its conventions in his comedy, Leonce und
Lena (1835), and even more profoundly in his grotesque tragedy, Woyzeck (1836-7), in
which the commedia dell’arte characters Capitano and Dottore are given darkly malevolent roles. The hapless and apparently witless Pedrolino character is Woyzeck
himself, servant to the Captain, who treats him as a stupid animal. Woyzeck also earns
a few pennies by allowing the Doctor to experiment on him. The Doctor feeds him
nothing but peas in order to prove some unstated scientific premise. Woyzeck
discovers his girlfriend Marie, the Columbina of the play, having an affair with the
dandified drum major, the Brighella character. He brings Marie to the side of a pond
and slits her throat. Returning to town, Woyzeck gets drunk. Imagining that people
are watching him with suspicion, he returns to the pond, throws the bloody knife in,
then, trying to throw it into even deeper water, presumably drowns.
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Commedia dell’arte, fiabesque
In an effort to establish neoclassical principles on the Italian stage, Carlo Goldoni
(1707-93) advocated a ban on commedia dell’arte, and he was successful in that he was
challenged by Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), who considered the improvisational tradition
too essential a part of the Italian theatrical heritage to be abolished. On his revival of
the commedia dell’arte, Gozzi gave to the Italian folk players the materials of the Italian
fiabe. He preserved the stock characters: Pantalone, Capitano, Dottore, Pedrolino,
Isabella, Columbina, Arlecchino, Scaramouche, Pulchinella, Truffaldino, Brighella,
and for his plots he adapted the popular tales, Il re cervo (1762; The King Stag), La
Donna serpente (1762; The Serpent Woman), L’amore delle tre melarance (1763; The Love
of Three Oranges), L’augellino belverde (1765; The Green Bird). Friedrich von Schlegel,
the Romantic critic, praised Gozzi as Italy’s leading playwright, and Schiller turned
Gozzi’s Turandot into a serious play, but it was Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) who
recognized the full potential of Gozzi’s defiance of neoclassical rule.
With the same rationale as Goldini’s, of insuring a more enlightened neoclassical
theater, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66) had banned Hanswurst ( John Sausage), the impudent and irreverent clown, from the German stage. Tieck was determined to bring him back as Germany’s equivalent to the traditional improvisational
player; Germany also had its traditional folk tales, the Märchen. In 1797, Tieck
produced his first folk tale comedies (Märchenspiele): Blue-Beard (Ritter Blaubart),
Puss-in-Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater), followed by Prinz Zerbino (1799), The Topsy-Turvy
World (1800; Die verkehrte Welt), and Little Red Riding Hood (1800; Rotkäppchen). In
defying neoclassical principles, Tieck informed his comedies with a relentless disruption of dramatic illusion that exemplified Romantic irony, as defined by Friedrich
Schlegel,4 and was praised by his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, as an elaboration
of the Shakespearean ‘‘play within a play.’’ Tieck had turned that device inside-out
with a ‘‘play about a play’’ (A. W. Schlegel 1828).
The disruption of illusion was wrought by ‘‘what is not in the play’’ intruding upon
the performance. In Puss-in-Boots, one supposedly expects an enactment of the folk
tale. The first characters to appear on the stage, however, are the audience, a fictive
audience, who begin to criticize the play even before the first act begins. Their
dialogue is about the nature of theatrical illusion and the credibility of performance.
How can one ‘‘enter into a reasonable illusion’’ when the main character is a talking
cat? The audience are the first and most vociferous intruders, but their complaints call
forth the playwright and the stage technician; the cat is joined by Hanswurst, and
neither is content to play out their roles. The audience rebels, the characters rebel, and
in the final scene the performers are upstaged by the stage itself, with Karl Schinkel’s
opulent decorations imported from The Magic Flute.
Introduced by Tieck in the 1790s, fiabesque comedy was not always shaped by the
same predilection for metadramatic self-reflexivity nor by the same ironic undercutting of its own fantasy. At the outset of his career, Clemens Brentano (1778-1842)
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sketched over a dozen plays, and brought several to publication: Gustav Wasa (1800),
Ponce de Leon (1801; published 1804), The Merry Musicians (1803; Die lustigen Musikanten). When Kotzebue ridiculed Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel in his
satirical comedy, The Hyperborean Jackass (1799; Der hyperborische Esel), Brentano came
to their defense with a farce in the manner of Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots. Brentano’s Gustav
Wasa was meant as a counterattack on Kotzebue, who had just written an historical
play of the same title. Kotzebue’s play was the product of his unfortunate visit to
Russia in 1800, where, suspected of Jacobin politics, he was banished to Siberia until
he was granted a reprieve after imprisonment for four months. Kotzebue’s play
celebrates Gustav Wasa as leader of the Swedish liberation following the Danish
invasion under Christian II. Following the Massacre of Stockholm, 1520, which
culminated with the execution of the leaders of the Swedish national party, Gustav
led the people to overthrow the Danish occupation. Gustav was crowned Gustav I in
1523. Henry Brooke had already adapted the subject as historical drama in Gustavus
Vasus, The Deliverer of His Country (1739), first performed in Dublin in 1744, and
revived at Covent Garden, London, in 1805. In his version, Kotzebue’s stresses not
revolution but nationalism. Satirizing the political ideology of the brothers Schlegel,
Kotzebue’s The Hyperborean Jackass puts their words into the mouth of one of his
characters. To make sure that no one misses the point, the published version asserts
the fact in introducing the dramatis personae, again in the dedication to the
Schlegels as editors of the Athenäum, and yet again by underlining all of the verbatim
passages in the text.
Brentano seeks to avenge the Schlegels by turning Kotzebue’s own method against
him. In his parodied version of Gustav Wasa, Brentano has his comic character speak
Kotzebue’s words with the effect that pathos lapses into bathos. The satire may have
been addressed against Kotzebue, but Brentano was so adept in mimicking the style
of Puss-in-Boots that Tieck thought himself the target of a devastating parody.5 In
spite of his appropriation of Tieck’s ‘‘play about a play’’ strategy, Brentano develops
none of the metadramatic possibilities. When a drunken actor is interviewed in the
tavern, or when the fictive audience studies the playbill in the theater, there is no
turnabout confusion of what is not ‘‘in’’ the play. Brentano is so completely preoccupied with the intertextual confrontations of parody that he pays no attention to the
self-reflexive potential of the dramatic situation.
The Merry Musicians, the only one of Brentano’s plays to gain success on the stage,
owed its popularity to the combination of melodrama and the antics of commedia
dell’arte. The music for the melodrama was composed by Peter Ritter (1763-1846),
director of the theater orchestra in Mannheim, where he conducted the performances
in 1804 and 1805. E. T. A. Hoffmann provided a more elaborate musical setting
and produced it as a comic opera at the Warsaw German Theater in 1805. In his
appraisal of The Merry Musicians, Hoffmann repeats Hamlet’s remarks to the
players: ‘‘The play. . . pleased not the million; ’twas caviar to the general.’’ Hoffmann
liked it – not in spite of but because of its fantastic excesses. Following the example of
Tieck’s fiabesque comedies, Brentano had appropriated the commedia dell’arte masques.
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‘‘But! – Holy Gozzi,’’ exclaimed Hoffmann, ‘‘what misbegotten creatures have been
produced out of the attractive characters of that jovial mischief’’ (letter to Theodor
Hippel, Sept. 26, 1805, Hoffmann 1967-9, I: 193-4; see also Allroggen 1970: 26-7,
43-61).
The fiabesque maintained its popularity on the stage throughout the Romantic
period. As already acknowledged, as late as 1835 Büchner turned to the fiabesque in
his Leonce und Lena. Tieck’s methods are even more obvious in Christian Dietrich
Grabbe’s Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning (1822; Scherz, Satire, Ironie, und tiefere
Bedeutung). As his title indicates, Grabbe is attentive to metadramatic self-reflexivity.
His characters do not step out of their roles, but they call attention to their roleplaying and being in a play. Just as Tieck called attention to the staging of Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791; Die Zauberflöte), Grabbe refers to Carl Maria
Weber’s The Marksman (1821; Der Freischütz). Weber’s opera mingles ingredients well
known to German Romanticism: simple peasant virtues threatened by the demonic
magic and latent evil of the forest, and a pact with the Devil. Grabbe’s play draws
upon, but burlesques, the same ingredients. Liddy, the niece and sole heir of Baron
von Haldungen, is engaged to Wernthal, who has sought her hand in marriage
because he needs her money to pay off his gambling debts. She is also sought after
by Freiherr von Mordax who wants her as a sexual plaything; if she continues to resist
his overtures he intends to abduct and rape her. She is loved by Mollfels, a longtime
friend who, considering himself too ugly and unworthy to court her, has left on an
extended journey. Returning just as the play opens, Mollfels seeks out his friends in
the village – the schoolmaster and Rattengift (Rat-poison), the poet – to inquire after
Liddy’s wellbeing. The schoolmaster complains that his talents are wasted on local
dunces who have no desire to learn. He is visited by Tobies, a farmer, who pledges
victuals and brandy if the schoolmaster will tutor his son, Gottliebchen, and prepare
him for the clergy. Although the boy is a complete dullard, the schoolmaster agrees,
and plans to take him to Haldungen Hall and seek a further stipend by passing him
off as a promising genius. When Mollfels arrives at the schoolhouse, he finds himself
in the company of the poet, the dullard, and the schoolmaster. Mollfels is depressed at
the news that Liddy is now engaged, and the others attempt to cheer him by getting
thoroughly drunk. Almost simultaneous with Mollfels’s return, the Devil is ousted
from Hell so that the Devil’s grandmother can complete her spring cleaning. He is
found freezing in the woods by four scientists who transfer him to Haldungen Hall in
order to conduct experiments and try to ascertain what species of creature he might
be. Once the Devil has thawed out in the Baron’s fireplace, he proceeds to work his
devilish schemes, bribing Wernthal to buy his claim to Liddy as his bride, and
plotting with Mordax to have Liddy delivered to a remote inn where he can abduct
her. When Mollfels arrives at the inn to rescue her, Liddy has already managed to
rescue herself. The schoolmaster, who has baited his trap with condoms, has caught
the Devil. In the grand denouement, Liddy and Mollfels embrace, and the Devil is
rescued by a beautiful young woman in Russian furs, who turns out to be his
grandmother. The playwright Grabbe arrives, bearing a lantern as did Diogenes in
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his quest for truth. Although the schoolmaster wants to bar the door to keep him out,
Grabbe enters with his lamp: the stage darkens and the curtain falls.
Some practitioners of the fiabesque choose not to allow the fantastic elements to be
dissolved in ironic exposé. Hoffmann was an author who saw the bourgeois and the
imaginative locked in an irresolvable rivalry. For him, the supernatural realm had
psychological validity for the imagination. The realm of dreams, desires, fears, and
taboos was a safe asylum to poets, dreamers, and visionaries, who were otherwise
considered misfits by the practical-minded philistines of bourgeois society. Among
his first musical compositions in Berlin was his three-act melodrama, The Mask
(1799; Die Maske), submitted to August Wilhelm Iffland, Director of the National
Theater, who declined to produce it. Existing models for melodrama or Singspiel
adhered to the example of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1770) with an emphasis
on the relation between voice, recitatif, and orchestration. Hoffmann gave far more
attention to physical movement and dance. He blended elements of the commedia
dell’arte with those of the opera buffa. If he had a particular work in mind, perhaps it
was Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), which he made the subject of a tale in 1813. The
dramatic action is interwoven with dance – a morris dance, a Turkish march – but also
emotional song, as the German artist Treuenfels expresses his love for Manandane,
daughter of a wealthy merchant. In addition to his musical setting to Brentano’s The
Merry Musicians, Hoffmann also provided the musical scores for Goethe’s Jest, Cunning,
and Revenge (1801; Scherz, List und Rache), Zacharias Werner’s The Cross on the Baltic
(1805; Das Kreuz an der Ostsee), C. Macco’s Arlequin (1808), Franz von Holbein’s
Aurora (1812) and, most successful, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1814), the
tragic love story of mermaid and mortal.
Ambiguity and Intuition
Innovator of a completely different style of drama, Heinrich von Kleist depicted
characters caught up in situations where intuitive reason (Vernunft) is pitted against
discursive understanding (Verstand). These are, of course, the contrasting modes of
thought described by Immanuel Kant in his Critical Philosophy. Kleist confessed his
Kantian crisis in a letter to Wilhelmina von Zenge on March 22, 1801:
We can never be certain that what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems so.
If the latter, the truth that we acquire here isn’t truth after we die – and all our efforts to
possess ourselves of something which might follow us to the grave are in vain. Oh
Wilhelmine, if the point of this thought doesn’t pierce you to the heart, don’t smile at
somebody who feels himself wounded by it in the innermost core of his being. My single,
my supreme goal has sunk completely and I have no other . . . (Kleist 104-5, V: 204-5)
While it might be doubted whether Kant’s philosophy alone had brought Kleist to
this impasse, the dilemma was certainly fixed in his mind as he wrote his tales and
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plays. The values of culture and custom are relative, but so too are the truths of
perception. Kant not only distinguished sensory phenomena from the actual thing in
itself (Ding an sich), he declared the impossibility of ever knowing the thing in itself.
The mind is thus confined within its own subjectivity incapable of ever knowing a
world of objective truth. Plot and character in a Kleistian play turn on the intuitive
moment.
Historically known, in the plays of Plautus and Molière, as a salacious comedy of
adulterous seduction, Amphitryon is transformed by Kleist into a dramatic questioning
of identity, loyalty, and fidelity. Jupiter, who took the shape of a swan to seduce Leda,
of a white bull to seduce Europa, of a cloud to seduce Io, of a shower of gold to seduce
Danae, must assume the identity of her husband, Amphitryon, in order to
seduce Alkmene. Jupiter and Mercury appear in Thebes in the shapes of Amphitryon
and his servant Sosias. Plautus treated the plot of mistaken identities much as he had
in the Menaechmi, source for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Alkmene and Amphitryon
each confronts a difficult test in reconciling their inner experience with their external
situation. Although he allows more antic confusion in the parallel subplot involving
Sosias and his wife Charis, even here Kleist does not resort to a comic romp with
Charis suddenly finding herself with two lovers. The crisis is as much in knowing
one’s own identity as is in knowing and trusting someone else. The confusion drives
the characters almost to desperation and madness before Jupiter reveals his true
identity. The question of identity, central to the play, is raised in the opening
encounter between Sosias and Mercury as his double:
Mercury [in the shape of Sosias, guarding the entrance to Amphitryon’s house]:
Who goes there?
Sosias: Me.
Mercury/Sosias: Me? What me, man?
Halt!
The all-too-glib declaration of ‘‘me’’ calls for differentiation, not simply in terms of
name and occupation, but in terms of personal history, property, and background. All
that Sosias can claim as belonging to ‘‘me’’ is immediately usurped by his interrogator,
who dismisses the true Sosias as a badly disguised imposter. Having been sent home
to Thebes to assure Alkmene that Amphitryon has won the battle against the
Athenians and leads his troops on their homeward march, Sosias is informed that
Sosias and Amphitryon are already returned. When Sosias endeavors to explain their
premature arrival to Amphitryon upon his return on the following morning, Amphitryon accuses him of delusion. However he must soon hear the same report from
his beloved Alkmene, who blesses him for his prompt return and for the joy he
brought her the previous night. Amphitryon, who cannot believe that his wife would
be unfaithful to him, is caught up in agony over her apparent betrayal of his love.
Jupiter/Amphitryon, however, can take no satisfaction in having seduced Alkmene,
for she recognizes in him only the husband to whom she is devoted. ‘‘Wasn’t it better
last night?’’ is not a plea that can prompt her to acknowledge a love more bountiful
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than what she has always felt for Amphitryon. The final act begins with a monologue
in which Amphitryon attempts to sort out his public and private predicament: in his
social role, he is celebrated for his victory, admired by his troops and his people, at the
pinnacle of fame; in his own mind, he is alone, friendless, no longer able to reason or
trust his five senses. Nevertheless he trusts Alkmene, knowing that she is incapable of
betrayal or deception. The conclusion to the play is a true and not inappropriate deus
ex machina: by thunder and lightning an eagle descends to reveal the true identity of
Jupiter, who gives his blessings to Amphitryon and Alkmene. Informed that she shall
bear a child to be named Hercules, Alkmene sinks into the arms of Amphitryon with
a final sigh, ‘‘Ach!’’
The trust that assured the reconciliation at the end of Amphitryon is the missing
element that results in the tragic end to Penthesilea (1808). Achilles has fallen in love
with Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, whose love he can court only through the
ritual of Amazonian battle. In their first battle, Penthesilea falls unconscious, but
Achilles persuades her that she has won, and he is her prisoner. But her Amazons
perceive that, in truth, she is his prisoner. They attack Achilles and rescue her.
Thinking to win her back by means of another pretended battle, he sends a messenger
to deliver the challenge. Penthesilea misunderstands his intention, and takes up the
challenge as a love-hate battle to the death. The title character of Käthchen von
Heilbronn (1808) is guided by intuition and dream, and has no conscious explanation
for her devotion to the Baron von Strahl. Similarly, the title character of Prinz
Friedrich von Homburg (1810) follows an impulsive vision of glory and consequently
disobeys his military orders.
The Broken Jug (1808; Der zerbrochene Krug), the most often staged of Kleist’s plays,
is a tale of foiled lechery. Adam, an elderly village judge, has tried to bribe a young
girl, Eve, to consent to his sexual advances by promising to release her betrothed,
Ruprecht, from his military service in the East Indies. As is revealed at the end of the
play, Adam had forged the letter of conscription, for Ruprecht had actually been
called to duty at a garrison in the neighboring city. Not willing to barter her body for
Ruprecht’s release, she rejects the judge’s proposal. He grows aggressive; she cries out.
Ruprecht breaks in by knocking down the door. Adam manages to escape but breaks a
jug in his hasty exit. Kleist forces the distinction between appearance and reality as
his frustrated seducer is called to judgment. The evidence against him is gradually
unfolded at a trial at which the judge himself presides. His bribe and attempted rape
are exposed as the last in the series of incriminating revelations in determining the
culprit responsible for the broken jug. The comic effects derive primarily from
Adam’s lies and evasions, Eve’s refusal to expose him for fear that her lover will be
sent abroad, and Ruprecht’s jealous conviction that his bride-to-be has been untrue.
The presence of Walter, the visiting circuit judge, requires Adam to attempt a
semblance of integrity, while Licht, his court secretary, uses Adam’s desperation to
his own advantage.
Although The Broken Jug might be named a close match for the sort of domestic
comedy that Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and other women playwrights of
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the period had made popular on the British stage, there was in fact no similar drama
produced during these years in Germany. The comedies of Kotzebue, such as The
Small-town Germans (1801; Die deutschen Kleinstädter) has social not domestic satire as
its target. Kotzebue was as deft in ridiculing the groveling German adulation of titles
as was Carl Zuckmayer, over a century later, in ridiculing the German fascination with
military uniform, rank, and command, in The Captain of Köpenick (1931; Der Hauptmann von Köpenick). Often dismissed as ‘‘trivial drama’’ or ‘‘entertainment piece,’’ the
German domestic drama did not advocate any change in the traditional roles for
women; it upheld, rather, the status quo and satirized any perceived deviations from
it. As actor, playwright, and from 1796, Director of the Berlin National Theater,
August Wilhelm Iffland (1759-1814) made domestic drama, the sentimental play of
everyday life, a mainstay of the annual repertory. His plays reveal a technical mastery
of the stage and effective situations.6 His best characters are simple and natural, fond
of domestic life, given to moralizing platitudes. His best-known plays are Die Jäger,
Dienstpfiicht, Die Advokaten, Die Mundel, and Die Hagstolzen.
Actor-manager Playwrights
The women playwrights in Germany did not raise such issues as a woman’s right to
control her own wealth or women’s right to choose her own husband – as in such
British plays as Cowley’s Bold Stoke for a Husband (1783) or Inchbald’s Animal
Magnetism (1788; rev. 1806). Karoline von Günderode (1780-1806), whose ‘‘closet’’
plays Udohla (1805), Magic and Destiny (1805; Magie und Schicksal), and Nikator
(1806) were published under the pseudonym ‘‘Tian,’’ imbued her exotic themes
with mythic grandeur and high romance. By contrast, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer
(1800-68) had a powerful command of theatrical strategy and wrote successfully for
the stage. She commenced her career as an actress at the Munich Court Theater, where
she assumed leading tragic roles from 1818 to 1826. From 1827 to 1830 she
performed at the theater in Vienna, but also accepted guest roles during these years
at theaters throughout Europe, with noted accomplishment in the title role of
Schiller’s Maria Stuart. She began writing plays in 1828, including sentimental
comedy and historical tragedy. She was especially successful at dramatizing the novels
of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Charles Dickens, and other popular
authors. She continued to act even after assuming the management of the Zurich
Theater from 1837 to 1843, where she allowed the English playwright Thomas Lovell
Beddoes to use her stage for a private performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. In
1844, she accepted an engagement at the Royal Theater in Berlin, where she remained
active until her death in 1868. Her 70 plays, adapted and original, were published in
23 volumes (Birch-Pfeiffer 1863-80).
Birch-Pfeiffer’s success, like that of Inchbald in England, owed much to a first-hand
knowledge of the theater. An understanding of the development of the drama in
Germany requires a familiarity with the leading theaters, their managers, their
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players, their audiences. Indeed, the distinction between ‘‘classic’’ and ‘‘Romantic’’ on
the German stage, no less than between high and low culture, is defined in great part
by who, when, and where. Properly celebrated for his transformation of the drama in
Germany, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing owed his influence not to just to his plays – Miss
Sara Sampson (1755), Minna von Barnhelm (1763), Emilia Galotti (1772), Nathan
the Wise (1779) – but also to his position as dramaturge and critic at the
German National Theater in Hamburg, where he wrote his Hamburgische Dramaturgie
(1767-9).
Just as one presumes a particular style and manner when referring to Drury Lane
under David Garrick or John Philip Kemble, so too the theaters of Berlin, Hamburg,
Mannheim, Bamberg, Braunschweig, or Weimar and Lauchstädt, bear the imprint of
their managers and players. An idol of playgoers at the Berlin National Theater during
the last decades of the eighteenth century was Johann Friedrich Ferdinand Fleck (17571801), who tended to rely on instinct and impulse, rather than attempting to control or
monitor his actions, with the result that his powerful delivery was sometimes misdirected and lapsed into rant and rave. In 1788, he won accolades for his performance of
Othello. For the later generation of the 1820s, Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832), was an
actor who thrilled Berlin audiences with his demonic manner in tragedy and his
bustling antics in comedy. He gave an individual identity to a broad range of character
types and was especially successful in the works of Shakespeare and Schiller.
In 1771 the Hamburg National Theater came under the management of Friedrich
Ludwig Schröder (1744-1816). His stepfather, Konrad Ernst Ackermann, and his
mother, Sophie Schröder, were both renowned performers, and young Schröder grew
up on the stage, playing roles even as a child, learning acrobatics, stage stunts, and
tricks of mimicry, from other members of the Ackermann troupe. Schröder became
the most celebrated German actor of his day. He founded the Hamburg School of
Acting, and was noted for his excellent ensemble productions, introducing historical
costume and set design. He translated and produced 11 Shakespearean plays, performing himself in such roles as Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Iago, Shylock, Lear,
Falstaff, and Macbeth. He also brought to the Hamburg stage the early plays of
Goethe – Götz von Berlichingen, Clavigo, and Stella. Schröder left Hamburg in 1780
and spent four years at the Vienna Burgtheater, where he wrote plays and introduced
ensemble acting. From 1785 to 1798 he was again director of the Hamburg National
Theater.
August Klingemann (1777-1831) was the influential playwright and director who
brought the Braunschweig Theater to prominence. He outstripped even Kotzebue as
author of the most often produced plays in Germany. In 1797, Klingemann’s first
play, The Mask (Die Maske) was accepted by Goethe for performance by his Weimar
troupe in Rudolfstadt. His identity as author of the prose satire, The Nightwatches
(1804; Die Nachtwachen), published under the name Bonaventura, was not established
until 1973 (see Schillemeit 1973, Wickman 1974, Flief 1985). He experimented in a
full range of genre: Candid Expressions (1804; Freimüthigkeiten), a satirical comedy; The
Lazzarone, or the Beggar of Naples (1806; Der Lazzaroni oder Der Bettler von Neapel ),
German Romantic Drama
169
a sentimental melodrama; Heinrich von Wolfenschießen (1806) and Columbus (1808),
historical drama; Don Quixote und Sancho Pansa (1811), comic melodrama. He founded
the Braunschweig National Theater, which opened on May 29, 1818, with a production of Schiller’s Braut von Messina. In 1826 it became the court theater of Duke Carl
II. Klingemann personally directed the first public performance of Goethe’s Faust,
opening on January 19, 1829.7
That the first public performance of Goethe’s Faust came relatively late in the period
may seem to be a peculiarity in theater history. It had, after all, become known
throughout Europe after the publication of Part I in 1808. Goethe had begun the
work in 1790 and Part II was not published until shortly before his death in 1832.
Faust’s dilemma, ‘‘two souls dwell, alas, within my breast’’ (‘‘zwei Seelen wohnen, ach!
in meinem Brust’’), impressed many as quintessentially Romantic. Germaine de
Staël, in De l’Allemagne, included a rich sampling of passages in her chapter on Goethe’s
Faust (de Staël [1810] 1985: 35-385). John Murray, de Staël’s London publisher,
commissioned Coleridge in 1814 to translate Faust. Coleridge never finished the
translation, but was persuaded by another publisher, Thomas Boosey, to take it up
again in 1820. In addition to Coleridge, others who turned their efforts to translating
Faust were John Anster, George Soane, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. In
1823 Murray was finally able to publish a full translation of Part I by Francis Gower.
Coleridge commenced a translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein (1796-9) during his stay in
Göttingen and completed it soon after his return. On the English stage, Schiller found
more success than Goethe during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Goethe directed the court theaters in Weimar and Lauchstädt, with performances of
Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm and Emilia Galotti, and Schiller’s Die Räuber, Maria
Stuart, and Don Carlos. After assuming the theater directorship in January, 1791, he
produced his Egmont in March. Many of his plays, including his Torquato Tasso
(published in 1790, first performed in 1806), had their first performance under his
direction in Weimar.
The themes of the Romantic drama in Germany were often shaped by the impact of
revolutionary issues, the Napoleonic conquest, and the Constitutional movement.
Rebellion against oppression was a repeated theme in the drama of the Sturm und
Drang movement; the vain struggle of free will against inevitable destiny was the
theme of the Schicksalstragödie. Adultery or loss of fortune provided numerous plots for
domestic tragedy. Comedy was strongly influenced by the commedia dell’arte, with a
consequent engagement of the fiabesque. Playwrights also began to emphasize the play
as play, with complex turns of self-reflexive metadrama and romantic irony. The
melodrama of the period experimented widely with the dramatic uses of song, and
corresponded with a growing audience interest in fantasy and the supernatural as
somehow copresent or interacting with dramatic realism. In the staging, much
attention was given to creating an illusion of the actual time and place both in
stage décor and in costuming.
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Frederick Burwick
Notes
1 Mr. Kemble’s Stranger is one of his most perfect and characteristic parts. . . . A deep fixed
melancholy sits upon his brow; hope has long
left his worn and faded cheek; his still and
motionless despair has almost changed him
into a statue, but he has not quite ‘‘forgot
himself to stone’’. A sigh of involuntary tenderness heaves his stately form, and shows that
there is life in it; a tear, ‘‘unused to flow’’,
stands ready to start from either eye; a pang
of bitter regret quivers on his lip; his tremulous hollow voice, labouring out its irksome
way, seems to give back the echo of years
departed hope and happiness. He is like sentiment embodied: a long habit of patient suffering, not seen but felt, appears to have subdued
his mind, moulded his whole form. We could
look at Mr. Kemble in this character, and
listen to him, till we could fancy that every
other actor is but harlequin, and that no tones
but his have true pathos, sense, or meaning in
them. (June 9, 1817, Hazlitt 1930-4, 18:
233-4)
2 ‘‘Schiller’s Robbers appears to have become a
direct source for The Borderers only in the
later stages of the composition, possibly as a
result of Wordsworth’s visit to Coleridge in
March [1797]’’ (Wordsworth 1982, 6: 11).
3 My translation; all translations are mine unless
otherwise indicated.
4 See F. Schlegel (1963: 85) on Romantic irony
as ‘‘permanent parabasis,’’ as in the illusiondisruption in the comedies of Aristophanes.
5 Carolina Schelling to Friedrich Schleiermacher, June 16, 1800, in Carolina und Dorothea
Schlegel in Briefen, p. 327, describes Tieck’s
anger and his ridicule of Brentano in ‘‘Der
neue Hercules am Scheideweg,’’ in Poetisches
Journal (Jena, 1800), 81-93; reprinted as
‘‘Der Autor, ein Fastnachtsschwank’’ in Tieck,
Schriften XIII: 267-79.
6 For criticism of Iffland and his plays, see Iffland (1798-1808, 1807, 1968).
7 On Klingemann’s staging see Burwick (1988,
1990).
References and Further Reading
Allroggen, Gerhard (1970). E. T. A. Hoffmanns
Kompositionen. Regensburg: Bosse.
Büchner, Georg ([1813-37] 1992-9). Sämtliche
Werke, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Henri Poschmann, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag.
Burwick, Frederick (1988). ‘‘Stage Illusion and the
Stage Designs of Goethe and Hugo.’’ Word and
Image, 4 (3-4): 692-718.
Burwick, Frederick (1990). ‘‘Romantic Drama:
From Optics to Illusion.’’ In Stuart Peterfreund
(ed.), Literature and Science: Theory and Practice.
Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. 167208.
Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer (1863-80). Gesammelte
dramatische Werke, 23 vols. Leipzig: Reclam.
Flief, Horst (1985). Literarischer Vampirismus: Klingemanns ‘‘Nachtwachen von Bonaventura.’’ Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Hazlitt, William (1930-4). The Complete Works of
William Hazlitt, ed. Percival Presland Howe, 21
vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1967-9). Briefwechsel, ed. H. von
Müller and F. Schnapp. München: Winkler.
Iffland, August Wilhelm (1798-1808). Dramatischen Werke, 17 vols. Leipzig: G. J. Göschen.
Iffland, August Wilhelm (1807). Almanach für
Theater und Theaterfreunde. Berlin: Bei Wilhelm
Oehmigke dem Jüngeren.
Iffland, August Wilhelm ([1798]1968). Meine
theatralische Laufbahn. Nendeln/Liechtenstein:
Kraus Reprint.
Johnson, Edgar (1970). Sir Walter Scott: The Great
Unknown, 2 vols. New York: Macmillan.
Kleist, Heinrich von (1904-5). Werke, ed. Georg
Minde-Prouet, Reinhold Steig, and Erich
Schmidt, 5 vols. Leipzig: Bibliographisches
Institut.
German Romantic Drama
Nicoll, Allardyce (1927). A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama, 1750-1800. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schillemeit, Jost (1973). Bonaventura. Der Verfasser
der ‘‘Nachtwachen.’’ Munich: Beck.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1828). ‘‘Review of
Tieck’s ‘Ritterblaubart’ and ‘Der gestiefelte
Kater.’ ’’ Reprinted in Kritische Schriften, 2
vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer, vol. 1, pp. 311-18.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1962-74). Kritische
Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer, 7 vols.
Schlegel, Caroline and Dorothea (1914). Caroline
und Dorothea Schlegel in Briefen, ed. Ernst Wieneke. Weimar: G. Kiepenheuer.
Schlegel, Friedrich (1963). ‘‘Zur Philosophie.’’
Fragment No. 668. In Ernst Behler with Jean
Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (eds.), Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 18.
München, Paderborn: Schöningh.
171
Shattuck, Charles H. (ed.) (1974). John Philip Kemble
Promptbooks, 11 vols. Charlottesville: Folger
Shakespeare Library/ University Press of Virginia.
Staël, Germaine de ([1810] 1985). De l’Allemagne.
Frankfurt: Insel Verlag.
Tieck, Ludwig (1828-54). Schriften, 28 vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer.
Wordsworth, William (1974). The Prose Works of
William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane
Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Wickman, Dieter (1974). ‘‘Zum BonaventuraProblem: Eine mathematisch-statistische Überprüfung der Klingemann-Hypothese.’’ Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 4:
13-29.
William Wordsworth (1982). The Borderers. In The
Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Robert Osborn, vol. 6.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
10
Early French Romanticism
Fabienne Moore
On sent le Romantique, on ne le définit point. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Néologie (1801)
1776: An Epithet is Born
In April 1776, as France eagerly awaited news of the American insurgents’ actions, a
French insurgent of sorts in the field of letters, the translator Pierre Le Tourneur
(1737-88), published the initial two volumes of his Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois, the
first complete and accurate translation in French prose of Shakespeare’s theater.
Backed by an unusual coalition of a thousand advance subscribers topped by the
French royal family, the King of England, and the Empress of Russia, Le Tourneur
ushered in the most powerful counter-example to the theater of Corneille, Racine, and
Molière supported by the French literary establishment. The aesthetic battle endured
but took a decisive turn when in 1821 there appeared a revision of Le Tourneur’s
translation whose success prompted Stendhal to announce that finally ‘‘a great
revolution in theater is brewing in France. Within a few years, we will make prose
tragedies and follow Shakespeare’s wanderings’’ (Martino 1925: xciii).
On February 24, 1776, two months before Le Tourneur’s launch, a lone figure had
sought to catch royal attention and arouse public sympathy by depositing a confessional manuscript on the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Its title announced:
Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Dialogues. Barred from the sacred choir by an unexpected
impassable railing, a desperate Jean-Jacques Rousseau had to turn back, then inward
again, resuming his quest for self-introspection and justification. His tell-all autobiographical Confessions and accusatory Dialogues, although already finished, would
appear posthumously, a stunning self-portrait whose sincerity and inner conflicts preempted the moral judgment customary to classic portraiture. In addition, the philosopher dedicated the last two years of his life to composing an unusual diary of
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musings. Begun in the autumn of 1776, the diary took the form of 10 meditative
promenades with the title Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (published posthumously in
1782). As he ruminated memories of times past, Rousseau set apart his most serene
and happiest recollection, celebrating in the fifth promenade a month-long exile on
the tiny Saint-Pierre island on the Swiss lake of Bienne. Still moved by the beauty of
the landscape and the protection nature had offered him then, Rousseau reminisced
and wrote: ‘‘The banks of Lake Bienne are wilder and more romantic that those of Lake
Geneva, because the rocks and woods border the water more closely; but they are not
less cheerful’’ (Rousseau 2000: 41).
Thus appeared the French epithet ‘‘romantique.’’ Where from? Rousseau had very
likely recently read Le Tourneur’s preface to the Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois and its
explanation for the neologism ‘‘romantique’’ used to qualify a cloudy landscape – a new
adjective probably coined by his collaborator Louis-Sébastien Mercier. At the same
time, another friend, the Marquis de Girardin, picked up ‘‘romantique’’ for his treatise
on gardening (1777), whose principles he applied to Ermenonville, the estate where
Rousseau was offered a last refuge, becoming his final resting place when he died a few
weeks later on July 2, 1778. Ten years later, recounting his sentimental pilgrimage to
the site of Rousseau’s tomb, set on an islet surrounded by poplars at the heart of
Ermenonville, Le Tourneur marveled at the ‘‘pleasant vale filled with the most
inspiring and romantic beauties’’ (Le Tourneur 1990a: 41-50, 1990b: 167).1
Reborn into French from the English transformation of romance, the adjective
crystallized around Rousseau and nature. Shakespeare’s genius had inspired Le Tourneur and Mercier’s provocative statement that ‘‘Nature is one and only, like truth;
neither one nor the other bears the epithet beautiful.’’2 But it took Rousseau’s embrace
of truth and nature for contemporaries to open themselves to a more hybrid and
complex aesthetic, privileging affect over effect, imagination over idealization, the
mystery of Romantic nature over the perfection of beautiful artifice.
That two foreigners, Shakespeare and Rousseau, stirred the Republic of letters is
not a coincidence. Outsiders bring the shock of the new and unfamiliar, in lieu of
conformity and imitation according to pregiven rules. Thus the wave of Anglomania
that swept France in mid-century slowly questioned following Greek and Roman
models, the hierarchy and separation of genres, and the imitation of beautiful nature,
principles now referred to as neo-Classicism. Rousseau did not wage war against
ancient times and models – to the contrary he cherished golden age pastorals – but
opposed the modern rationalist and materialist worldview. He embraced the freedom
to criticize, which Enlightenment philosophers established as a fundamental right, to
expose the shortcomings of Enlightenment philosophy as well as the stultifying
confines of ancien régime society.
We must be mindful that literary history constructed a posteriori the periodization
of neo-Classicism, Enlightenment, and early Romanticism to circumscribe movements of thought which, far from separate and consecutive, intersected and bled into
one another. Rousseau’s oeuvre transcends these partitions.
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Fabienne Moore
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78): Back to Origins
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, character, and mode of existence challenged and
permanently altered the French way – manners of thinking and acting framed by
national pride and solidified by an absolute monarchy. Although scholars will
continually be challenged by the enigma of Rousseau’s genius, we can identify two
striking features at the source of his nonconformity: the absence of national and
educational bounds. Rousseau was born a citizen of Geneva, an independent Swiss
Republic offering a unique combination of political and religious freedom for the
French outside France. French was written and spoken in a democracy espousing
liberal Protestantism. Rousseau’s wanderlust drove him to leave Geneva at age 14,
beginning a lifelong love/hate relationship, including forgoing then regaining citizenship, converting to Catholicism (1728) then back to Calvinism (1754), living in
France with periods of exile in various Swiss counties which, in turn, expelled him,
dying in France with his ashes eventually transferred to the Pantheon by French
revolutionaries (1794). The vagaries of Rousseau’s citizenship (the Swiss, French, and
even Prussians could claim him as their own) underscores his nationlessness.
Freed of national identity, Rousseau was also free from the educational confines
imposed by family and school: he grew up motherless, given free reign by his father,
with no formal schooling and an incomplete apprenticeship as an engraver. Rousseau
eventually devised his own idiosyncratic system of learning, with far less exposure to
rhetoric than in a traditional education. The singularity of Rousseau’s entire oeuvre
may derive from this self-education. The absolute freedom of individual conscience
despite social pressures, and a natural, ‘‘negative’’ education without walls (institutional or pedagogical), became cornerstones of his philosophy.
To ask ‘‘Was Rousseau an early Romantic?’’ and ‘‘Were Romantics all Rousseauists?’’ is to wonder about the prefiguration in Rousseau’s work of themes now
associated with Romanticism. Rather than reading forward and backward to find
the seeds of Romanticism – with the risk of planting them ourselves – let’s focus on
how Rousseau’s originality distinguished itself from his contemporaries’.
Music, sentiment, nature
Before becoming a man of letters, Rousseau was and remained a man of music. His
first publication concerned a new system of musical notation. His career began with
two operas Les Muses galantes (1744), and Le Devin du village (1752). His last years
were devoted to composing songs, aptly titled Les Consolations des misères de ma vie. He
wrote articles on music for Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and later revised them in a Dictionnaire de la musique (1767). He hand-copied musical scores for a living. This passion
was a fight as well: in the confrontation between French and Italian music, Rousseau,
like most philosophes, embraced the melodic freedom and impassioned accents of
Italian music and disparaged the French emphasis on instrumental harmony – too
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175
mechanical, icy, and ‘‘noisy.’’ Transported by the expressivity of Italian music he has
just heard, Rousseau’s character Saint-Preux will urge his lover Julie to learn this
language of the heart: ‘‘So abandon forever that boring and lamentable French song
that is more like the cries of colic than the transport of passion. Learn to produce those
divine sounds inspired by sentiment, the only ones worthy of your voice, the only ones
worthy of your heart, and which always carry along with them the charm and fire of
sensible temperaments’’ (Rousseau 1997: 110). Originally developed in the Essai sur
l’origine des langues (1764), the idea that ‘‘Poetry, song, and speech have a common
origin’’ encouraged a return to the original conjunction between music and poetic
sentiment, exemplified by Rousseau’s own musical prose.
For generations, including his own, only Rousseau has been known on a first-name
basis. Whereas Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, or Sade’s first names seem inconsequential and are barely remembered, ‘‘Jean-Jacques’’ is substituted for Rousseau in
correspondence as well as past and present criticism. Aside from the practical issue of
distinction from his namesake, the then-famous poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, the
public use of Rousseau’s Christian name – by himself and others – has a vast symbolic
resonance. It lays the private self in the open, it emblazons subjectivity and intimacy.
Samuel Richardson’s novels of sentiment had illustrated how the heart led to virtue,
thus framing the question of sensitivity as a moral quest towards goodness. In his
widely successful epistolary novel, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloı̈se (with more than 70
editions from 1761 to 1800) Rousseau opens the tortured heart of Saint-Preux, a
young tutor in love with his pupil Julie, who eventually obeys her father’s choice of a
better match. After her husband knowingly chooses her former lover to become their
children’s tutor, Julie’s virtue struggles until death to turn thwarted love into
friendship. In life as in fiction, Rousseau wanted to study individualities and characters: Émile ou traité sur l’éducation details an imaginary boy’s mental, emotional, and
moral development guided by radically new pedagogical principles based on the free
discovery of the world of nature and the intellect. When Jean-Jacques turned to
himself as subject and object of study in his autobiographical Confessions, the story of
his life became emblematic of how social forces restrict individual freedom.
Contrary to those who distrusted emotion as misleading and believed reason alone
to be reliable, Rousseau maintained that emotions reveal truth, that they tell as much
as the mind about how to read the inner and exterior worlds. He honored but did not
privilege reason. In the name of truth, therefore, feelings were no longer idealized as
in L’Astrée, the seventeenth-century pastoral admired by Rousseau, but described in
their psychological complexities and piercing force. This liberation of the lyrical self
had considerable appeal, particularly among women who turned to sentimental
realism to convey their plights in real or imaginary correspondences and novels.
Sentiment and nature had long been wedded in poems and pastorals. Allegories of
the seasons, symbolic fruit and flowers, idealized landscapes, an enchanted southern
countryside, offered an abstract, eternally pleasing (riante) nature severed from reality.
As with music and sentiment, Rousseau refused artifice when it came to nature. The
wild contrasts of Swiss landscapes beloved since childhood, the rustic pleasures of his
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Fabienne Moore
various country retreats, and the fascination with plants (stored and classified in
herbals) translated into a celebration of nature’s spectacles and riches as they affect
the soul and penetrate the mind. In lieu of clichéd allegorical deities, Rousseau
described nature as an immediate experience, a direct revelation of thoughts and
emotions. By subtitling his only novel ‘‘Letters of two lovers who live in a small town
at the foot of the Alps,’’ Rousseau fused the mountainous locale with his characters’
lives. Saint-Preux tries to convey to Julie his awe at the sublime Valais mountains:
‘‘the spectacle has something indescribably magical, supernatural about it that ravishes the spirit and the senses; you forget everything, even yourself, and do not even
know where you are’’ (Rousseau 1997: 65). Julie reciprocates by introducing him to
her ‘‘Elysium,’’ the beautiful private orchard she designed to operate a different magic
than the nearby fearsome mountains: a place of delectation through pure illusion,
where domesticated nature appears wild. Did Julie’s invisible hand follow principles
governing English gardens (as opposed to the classic symmetry of French gardening)?
Rather, she applied the beloved classical tradition of Virgil’s locus amoenus (place of
delights), a topos of landscape description. Thus Rousseau’s approach to nature
combined classic poetical reminiscences with a personal affinity for contrasted, soulstirring landscapes, as well as a passion for botany, the prosaic observation of the
vegetal world. This unusual combination gave Rousseau his name as ‘‘l’homme de la
nature,’’ engraved in the iconography and imagination of the succeeding generation.
The religion of nature became Rousseau’s natural religion, based not on revelation,
dogma, nor organized churches, but on an intimate, inner sense of God’s existence and
an innate principle of justice and virtue (conscience). Contemplating the Alps
crowning the horizon, a poor ecclesiastic from the mountainous Savoy region confides
to the young Émile the essence of natural religion, an unmediated relation to the
divine, which means the only essential cult is of the heart. ‘‘The Profession of Faith of
the Savoyard Vicar’’ was deemed to be so impious and dangerous by both Paris and
Geneva that it caused Rousseau’s banishment and the burning of his treatise Émile.
Thus Rousseau increasingly experienced nature as a refuge: promenades, reveries,
and herborizing excursions provided solace from alienation and persecution. Nature,
breathing purity and harmony, freed the writer to follow the meandering streams of
consciousness and find his unique rhythm.
1776-1816: A Controversial Period
Rousseau’s writings exerted a powerful gravitas over the whole European world. A
systematic reference point to all aspiring for change (in politics, society, and literature), his work offers a challenge to literary historians in search of Romanticism’s
beginnings. This is the paradox at the heart of ‘‘pre-Romanticism,’’ a convenient
though inadequate term applied to a complex period, part eighteenth-century Enlightenment, part nineteenth-century nascent Romanticism, yet not merely transitional. Ever since its coinage around 1910, critics have disagreed on its chronological
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span, its specificity, or lack thereof, and its relevance. Its prefix implies continuity
with the subsequent, recognized Romanticism of Victor Hugo’s generation, while its
suffix suggests the unity of a movement – a continuity and unity both subject to
disputation (see Minski 1998). When a 1972 symposium gathered eminent scholars
to ponder the notion of French ‘‘pre-Romanticism’’ they could neither resolve its
definition nor jettison the term (Viallaneix 1975). Rather, its ideological underpinnings were clarified. At the beginning of the twentieth century anti-German sentiment drove some French critics to define pre-Romanticism as an evolution internal to
French letters, downplaying foreign influences, most notably German, and Germaine
de Staël’s introduction of them (see e.g., Mornet 1912, Monglond [1930] 1965). To
correct the bias of this historical nationalism, comparatists widened the movement to
Europe (see e.g., Van Tieghem 1967). Those who struck a balance, acknowledging
innovations within a classic framework, nevertheless favored one author over another,
diminishing Staël’s contribution while heralding Chateaubriand’s.3
Clearly, pre-Romanticism is a critical construct, not a defined historical period. As
Frank Bowman recently put it, the term is ‘‘rather suspect since no one ever called
himself a pre-Romantic’’ (Bowman 1999: 77). The challenge therefore consists in
adopting a historical perspective that excludes teleological illusions, namely projections
of things to come. After structuralism and sociocriticism shaped analysis, recent
research has emphasized the overcoming of tradition towards a new, modern vision of
literature (see Bénichou 1996, Delon 1998, Fabre 1980, Mortier 1982, Minski 1998). A
recent tendency has been to move away from a history of ideas towards a cultural history
that establishes ‘‘a connection between, on the one hand, the great social and economic
transformations that accompanied the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, and on the other hand the upheavals in the modes of thinking and perceiving
the world . . . ’’ (Ceserani 1999: 9). In a provoking essay, Bowman (1999) has proposed
defining the ‘‘specificity of French Romanticism’’ in terms of ‘‘exacerbated polarities,’’
an approach which I would argue also depicts accurately the preceding period, when the
Revolution became the ultimate polarizing event for the generation who lived it. Indeed
the voices and texts of this period are a study in contrasts, simultaneously original and
conservative both in form and content. The expression of individual geniuses and the
controversy generated by their work speak to sociohistorical unrest and uncertainties
born of the Enlightenment’s optimistic, forward drive. Rousseau figures prominently in
the present chapter to reflect how early this disruption began.
The Specificity of Early French Romanticism
The plight of a generation
Early French Romanticism is first of all the story of one generation who experienced
in rapid succession three monumental historical disruptions. This generation lived
through the collapse of the monarchy under which they grew up, the capsizing of the
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Revolution into the Terror, and the downfall of Napoleon after a 20-year reign. Gains
of freedom and equality remained under constant threat, while losses (of lives, fortune,
and privileges) mounted. Cycles of nostalgia and expectations, elation and horror,
hope and disappointment spread confusion and mal-être. Hesitations about women’s
new status as citizens were reflected in individual fates. While the new Republic chose
an allegorical Marianne to represent itself, early French Romanticism wavered between equally compelling and symbolic destinies. Was its Marianne the late Julie de
l’Espinasse (1732-76), the philosophes’ hostess, a tortured heart who rendered her
torment in private correspondence and died of love and tuberculosis? 4 The beheaded
martyrs of the Revolution Madame Roland (1754-93) and Olympe de Gouges (174593), the author of the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791)? The
modern thinker Germaine de Staël or her friend Juliette Récamier, the neoclassic icon
of beauty and platonic love immortalized by the painter David and hopelessly loved
and adulated by her male contemporaries? Muse, medusa, ‘‘mistress of an age,’’ women
transformed themselves, a change reflected in life and fictional representations where
the wish for freedom clashes with knowledge of an unhappy destiny. To women
especially but not exclusively, Rousseau became this generation’s common reference
via his alienation and his drive to respond and generalize it.
Denied freedom of expression by the Terror, then by Napoleon’s regime, the early
Romantic generation had to continue the political fight of the ancien régime’s
philosophes, sharing with their forebears the pain of censorship and exile. On the
other hand, they gained a renewed appreciation of religious expression when Napoleon reversed the Revolution’s religious ban, leading the spiritual dimension to
resurface in literature. Three authors stood at the forefront of this chaotic period:
Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and François-René Chateaubriand.
One of the most original and complex features of early French Romanticism remains
the role of his generation’s best-known member: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).
Not only did the Corsican general turned emperor thrust French politics and history
into modernity, but his personality and fate also epitomized the fallen heroism central
to Romantic literature. Yet at the same time, his regime’s strong reaffirmation of
neoclassical values, dubbed the Empire style, and extending from fashion (high-waisted
white muslin dresses) to furniture, architecture, and painting, represented a return to
antiquity that also left a strong imprint on literature.
A literature under shock
This generation called for a new literature to match historical change but this
imperative raised questions hard to resolve in the flux of transformations: how to
create, what tools to use, what references? Artists could strive for the neoclassical
perfection beloved by the French national tradition, or venture imperfect new genres.
They could embrace foreign traditions as a process of rejuvenation or fear their lack of
taste. The results were hybrid creations, a literature best defined as experimental,
partly didactic, partly imaginative.
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The poetry of this tumultuous historical period, from the last decade of Louis XVI’s
reign to the Empire, is a kaleidoscope of themes and styles, a mixture of old and new,
with no equivalent figureheads to the central six poets of English Romanticism. Since
the mid-eighteenth century theoreticians had studied the origins of language and
poetry to advocate a return to musicality and enthusiasm, yet in practice French poets
resisted change, and innovations remained circumscribed. Paradoxically and contrary
to received opinion, the period stands out for the abundance and variety of its poetic
production. But without unity or dominating trend, this poetic profusion does not
lend itself to a simple classic/Romantic dichotomy. In search of itself, poetry took
various directions. With Les Jardins (1782) Jacques Delille (1738-1813) continued the
descriptive poetry of nature spearheaded by Jean-François Saint-Lambert (1716-1803)
in Les Saisons (1769). André Chénier (1762-94) revived classical myths as in
‘‘Hermès,’’ and the modern myth of the New World with ‘‘L’Amérique,’’ invigorated
by American Independence. Creole poets like Évariste Parny (1753-1814) developed
exotic, elegiac themes. The theosophist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803)
imagined new rhythms to match spiritual elevation (L’Homme de désir, 1790). While
the above works are remarkable for their length and scope, there was also an adverse
reaction to voluminous, often epic, poems, with the taste for short, ‘‘fugitive’’ poems,
symptomatic of the shift towards a new poetics privileging instantaneity over narration (see Delon’s 1997 anthology).
The evolution of theater was also incremental although many dramatists broke
rules sooner and faster than poets did, and prose was well accepted except for
tragedies, the last bastion. A key date in this emancipation is the 1791 law fostered
by Beaumarchais (1732-99) establishing authors’ rights, which finally broke the
actors’ despotic control over playwrights. Mercier’s polemical treatise on theater
(1773) turned against the French classical tradition to advocate the ‘‘drame bourgeois’’
composed for the people, who will reach its moral goal through emotion. Like
Schiller, Mercier sought to realize dramas about social conditions, not characters.
While contemporary actors would not perform Mercier’s plays on account of his
radical theses, today it is their heavy-handed morality that spoils them for readers
and spectators. As will be seen repeatedly, before aesthetics achieved the lyricism
called for by early French Romantics, it remained but a doctrinal aesthetic, namely
theoretical, wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Mercier, inspired by but more radical
than his predecessor Diderot, actively advanced dramatic theory, towards Stendhal’s
Racine et Shakespeare and Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell.
The Three Representatives of Early French Romanticism
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817): The voice of the other
Staël lived only 51 years but pioneered the most progressive and bold ideas. She
inaugurated the type of the ‘‘intellectuelle engagée,’’ the female intellectual stepping into
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public debate no matter the cost. In detailing obstacles and hardships, Mary Shelley’s
essay on Staël’s life seemed to invite a reading of the destiny of female genius as the
quintessential Romantic quest for freedom and acceptance (Shelley 2002). Born in
Paris, she was raised a Swiss Protestant like Rousseau, by parents from the high
bourgeoisie who lavished on her the finest education. She learnt from her mother’s
famed Parisian salon in the presence of luminaries such as Diderot and Grimm, and
from the tumultuous political career of her famous father, an agent and victim of the
revolutionary cause.5 French, Swiss, or Swedish according to her needs (she married, de
convenance, the Swedish Ambassador to Paris from whom she separated in 1797), she
breathed cosmopolitanism, inviting an international set of guests to Coppet, her
residence by Lake Geneva, and spent her life traveling: first to England (1793) and
Germany (where in 1803-4 she met Goethe and Schiller, and hired August Wilhelm
Schlegel as her children’s tutor); then Italy (1805) and north-eastern Europe (Vienna,
Moscow, St Petersburg, Stockholm in 1812-13), back to England, where she met
Byron (1813-14),6 and Italy (1815). Political circumstances repeatedly forced her out
of Paris: Coppet became a refuge from the Terror, then her headquarters after
Napoleon banished her from the capital in 1803, and his police kept harassing her,
prompting her flight to Germany. Dix années d’exil (published posthumously in
1820), ‘‘the most simple and interesting of her works’’ according to Mary Shelley,
records a decade spent escaping the wrath of him who ‘‘oppressed her because she
refused to be his tool’’ (Shelley 2002: 479).
Staël’s political independence started early and never swayed: she wrote a plea
against the queen’s execution, labored for the return of émigrés, including Chateaubriand, then involved herself in parliamentary politics through her friend Constant.
Her outspoken letters to Jefferson to press for an American intervention against
Napoleon are remarkable examples of her political activism. Napoleon could neither
abide her political maneuvering which he deemed dangerous, nor her work, which he
read as ‘‘anti-French’’ in its praise of foreigners, or more pointedly in its insulting
silence towards the Emperor. The two novels and two major essays that established
her reputation as one of Europe’s leading femmes de lettres provided a response to the
continuing historic upheaval reshaping France, as well as an opening towards foreign
national traditions and innovations discovered while in exile.
First came De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales
(1800), an ambitious interpretation of literature as the expression of society, determined by history, geography, and politics. Thus far, traditional criticism appraised
beauties and defects according to set rules. Staël still believed taste was not arbitrary
even when shaped by national variations, but she invoked genius as the ultimate
arbitrator. The essay contrasts Northern and Southern literature, the ancients and
moderns, opposing Homer, the father of classical poetry, to Ossian, the origin and
representative of the melancholy literature of the North. Northern imagination favors
dark imagery, inspiring philosophical self-reflections, reinforced by Christian religion
and its emphasis on self-introspection. ‘‘In order to characterize the general spirit of
each literature,’’ Staël moves from an analysis of Greek and Latin literature to a
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selection of representative masterpieces from Italian, English, German, and French.
Shakespeare rises as a modern who invented a new literature, superior to the classics for
its ‘‘philosophy of the passions and knowledge of men’’ although less perfect artistically
(Staël 1991: 224). England stands out as a land where freedom has encouraged the
sublime meditations of Pope and Milton, and the poetic enthusiasm of Dryden, Gray,
Thompson, and Young. ‘‘Happy the country where the writers are gloomy, the merchants satisfied, the rich melancholy, and the masses content’’ (Berger 1964: 205). It is
also a land where women are loved and respected, hence the rise of a new genre, novels
based not on history or fantasy but imagined characters and their private lives. Staël
credits English novelists for being the first to captivate the imagination by painting
private affections and moral dilemma (see chap. 15 ‘‘De l’imagination des Anglais dans
leurs poésies et leurs romans,’’ in Staël 1991: 235-45).
The second part focuses on postrevolutionary France and offers ‘‘conjectures’’ on its
future progress, insisting that political freedom and equality are prerequisites for any
improvement. In its defense of freedom, De la littérature celebrates the philosophy of
the eighteenth century as well as Republican liberalism. Against counterrevolutionary
conservatives, Staël believed in humankind’s ‘‘perfectibility,’’ refusing to attribute the
crimes of the Revolution to philosophy.
De l’Allemagne applied these principles to Germany, whose language Staël learnt
with Wilhelm von Humboldt and whose literature and philosophy she studied in situ.
However, Staël’s wish to introduce it to France in 1810 met with Napoleon’s
censorship and order of exile, a reaction to her perceived betrayal of national interest.
Regardless, De l’Allemagne was published in French in London in 1813 and Paris in
1814, and sold equally well in translation. Tying national character to national
literature, Staël inaugurated a new criticism no longer grounded in the rules set by
the ancients but in the critic’s sympathetic engagement with authors and works under
consideration. In this she followed Schlegel’s theory of literary criticism based not on
the technical details of a literary work but on creative genius. Translated in 1813 by
her cousin, Albertine Necker de Saussure, W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische
Kunst und Literatur (1809-11) hailed Shakespeare as an exemplar in the mélange of
lyric and dramatic genres, grotesque and serious tones. Besides W. and F. Schlegel’s
work, Staël presented Germany’s greatest philosophers, poets, novelists, historians,
and artists (from Goethe to Tieck, Jean Paul, and Mozart among others) drawing
comparisons with their French or European counterparts, an original comparative
approach not meant to set up models for imitation but rather to foster inspiration and
a European union of arts and letters. De l’Allemagne also introduced Kant’s metaphysics to French readers. His defense of morality and religion went in the same direction
as Staël’s championing of spiritualism as indispensable to renewal in society, politics,
and literature. His was a prime example of the compatibility between faith and
reason, which French Enlightenment philosophes had not believed possible. In the
final section on ‘‘religion and enthusiasm’’ Staël writes beautifully on the ‘‘natural
alliance between religion and genius’’ particularly evident in the contemplation of
nature (Staël 1968: II, 272).
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Through De la littérature and De l’Allemagne Staël was channeling into France new
sources of inspiration to base a new aesthetic. By contrast, she did not seek to
demonstrate new writing principles in her novels, which remain traditional in their
form as well as their plot around societal obstacles to love and freedom. Named after
their eponymous heroines – in many respects Staël’s surrogates – Delphine (1802) and
Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) – put on trial women’s condition, at once novels and disquisitions. In her very long, first letter-novel set from 1790 to 1792, a wealthy young widow
falls in love with her cousin’s fiancé, Léonce, but mothers conspire to separate them.
Delphine loses her reputation with impulsive acts of generosity and heedless independence, distressing Léonce who is afflicted by a paralyzing sense of propriety. Manipulators marry him off and trap Delphine into taking religious vows. She escapes to commit
suicide rather than survive her lover, who has run away to war after his wife’s death.
Delphine’s perceived immoralism, its views on marriage and the right to divorce or
break monastic vows scandalized France and elated Germany. ‘‘Delphine is a work
remarkable as a novel of moral ambiguity written in a tone of moral certitude.
[Rousseau’s] La Nouvelle Héloı̈se had established this mode, so widely successful with
the public’’ (Gutwirth 1978: 128). Staël reversed the much criticized suicide ending
when the book was re-edited in 1820.7 Permeated by her reading of Rousseau, Goethe,
Byron, and Chateaubriand, Staël’s tragic tale gives voice to her otherness as a woman
artist in the clutches of both oppressive love and repressive society. For the cruel
consequence of love as an existential need for women is the purposeful self-abasement
of their talents and character (Gutwirth 1978: 102-53). Romanticism and feminism are
still anachronisms, held back by the concern for novelistic and moral conventions.
This is true as well of Corinne ou l’Italie. This travelogue met with immediate
success in France and abroad, including America where Staël sent Jefferson a personal
copy. A beautiful female poet, renowned for her eloquent improvisations, living a
free-spirited life in her adopted country, Italy, falls in love with a melancholy English
lord, Nevil, who eventually leaves her for a paragon of virtue and traditional
womanhood, Lucile. The novel gives voice to three nations, calling for a political
and ideological reading that got Staël in trouble once again.
The portrayal of female genius, although she meets a tragic fate – the heart-broken
Corinne dies – galvanized women authors such as Letitia Landon (L. E. L.) who
adapted Staël’s plot in The Improvisatrice (1824). Byron read Corinne as an allegory of
the misunderstood genius, of unrewarded creative generosity. He even annotated his
lover Teresa’s Italian translation of the novel, remarking that Staël ‘‘is sometimes right
and often wrong about Italy and England – but almost always true in delineating the
heart, which is but of one nation and of no country or rather of all’’ (Byron 1991: 2234). Mary Shelley agreed but faulted the tragic ending: ‘‘For the dignity of womanhood, it were better to teach how one, as highly gifted as Corinne, could find
resignation or fortitude enough to endure a too common lot, and rise wiser and better
from the trial’’ (Shelley 2002: 484).
Mary Shelley’s main point of contention with the two novels is that ‘‘they do not
teach the most needful lesson – moral courage’’ (Shelley 2002: 493). Unlike Richard-
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son’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, Staël’s unhappy heroines die crushed and diminished, their passions having dominated their reason to the end. In the tradition of
Greek and Racinian tragedies, the weight of external forces upon the characters
contributes to their downfall.
Published in Italy, Staël’s last work, De l’esprit des traductions (1816), encouraged
Italians to translate English and German poetry to discover new genres and free their
art from ancient mythology. She further advocated translation of Shakespeare and
Schiller’s theater ‘‘for theater is really the executive power of literature’’ (Staël 1861:
296). A. W. Schlegel is the model translator, combining ‘‘exactitude with inspiration’’
in contrast with French habits of adaptation to national taste. This short provocative
essay marked the departure point for the Romantic battle in Italy, a fire set by Staël in
a final plea for emancipation. To the end ‘‘an incorrigible Revolutionary’’ – in the
words of the Milanese governor – she died on Bastille Day, 1817.
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830): Of love and politics
Like Rousseau and Staël, Benjamin Constant was a Swiss Protestant, inheriting a
tradition of liberalism of which he would become the most forceful advocate. He
received his education in England, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, eventually
spending two years at Edinburgh, Scotland, where he participated in the exclusive
debating club, the Speculative Society.
His passionate and tormented liaison with Staël shaped his literary output as well
as his political activism. The enthusiastic articles he wrote for Le Publiciste in 1807
defending Corinne ou l’Italie had the benefit of insight but also a telling biographical
slant, responding to the tragic life of the female genius by justifying the male
protagonist’s torn character (Balayé 1968). Like Staël, his literary criticism was
ahead of practice. When he adapted Schiller’s tragedy Wallenstein (1809), a preface
praised the power of German drama unbound by the French sacrosanct principle of
the three unities (time, space, and action), but his tame, abridged, and faulty
translation ultimately bowed to French taste, as if the time had not yet come. More
successful was the transposition of his unhappy love life into the short novels Adolphe
(1816) and the unfinished Cécile. Constant’s prose achieved a piercing exactness in
capturing the psychology of characters torn by their prevarication, the author’s own
failing, so ironically opposed to the constancy implied in his name.
While Staël could never hold an elected office on account of her sex, Constant
thrust himself into politics, writing key essays at each turning point (on the Terror,
the freedom of the press, elections, bipartisanship, constitutional politics, religion),
serving in office when nominated or elected, falling in and out of favor, maintaining
in the face of incredible political turmoil and a succession of postrevolutionary
authoritarian regimes his opposition to power by force and respect for parliamentarism. He embodied the motto, later used by the ultra-royalists to insult the new
generation of poets and critics, that Romanticism is Protestantism in politics, letters
and art – the spirit of freedom.
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Chateaubriand (1768-1848): Bard of past times
Unlike Staël’s childhood, surrounded by a whirlwind of celebrities who inspired and
gave free reign to her intellect, Chateaubriand’s formative years were pervaded by
solitude and gloom, giving free reign to his imagination instead. Chateaubriand grew
up in the austere medieval castle of Combourg, surrounded by Brittany’s tempestuous
ocean, its forlorn marshes and brooding skies, a witness to the comings and goings of
ships and the endless wait for the mariners’ return. These leitmotivs struck a chord of
recognition when discovered in Ossian. Of all French regionalisms, Brittany’s Celtic
lore was the closest to the Gaelic bard’s invocations. Le Tourneur’s complete translation of Ossian (1777-84) spurred numerous imitations, including Chateaubriand’s.
Encouraged by his melancholy sister Lucile, inspired by the English poets Thomas
Gray, James Thompson, Edward Young, and by Salomon Gessner’s Idylls, a morose
Chateaubriand tried his hand at poetry, composing from 1784 to 1790 a series of
‘‘Tableaux de la nature’’ where nature’s beautiful resilience contrasts with the poet’s
tenuous life. The lyric ‘‘I’’ at the center of these early poems bathes in a Rousseauist
reverie.
Outgrowing fugitive poetry, Chateaubriand began to envision an epic narrative,
‘‘l’épopée de l’homme de la nature’’ but the ambitious fresco on the North-American Indians
would not come to life: ‘‘ I soon realized I lacked true colors, and if I wanted a faithful
picture, I, like Homer, had to visit the people I wanted to paint’’ (Chateaubriand 1996:
65). To justify his aesthetic project of traveling to America, Chateaubriand conceived of
a scientific purpose, namely the discovery of the Northwest passage, itself a journey of
epic proportion in keeping with his ambitious dreams and boundless self-assurance.
Fraught with contradictions and paradoxes, Chateaubriand’s encounter with the New
World (April 1791-January 1792) produced a shock that reverberated throughout his
life and writing. Although he visited large cities, the traveler followed his exploratory
instinct and spent most of his time in the wilderness (‘‘le désert’’). Instead of the
Northwest passage, Chateaubriand discovered a still unspoiled, awe-inspiring nature,
home to an indigenous people on the verge of extinction, uprooted and corrupted by
settlers and traders – a ruined noble savage.
Following his return from America, Chateaubriand spent seven months in France,
hastily married, then joined the royalist army of princes in August 1792. Soon
wounded and sick, he fled to his uncle’s in Jersey, then moved to England in May
1793. Exile had begun: Chateaubriand would return to France only seven years later,
in May 1800.
In 1797 Chateaubriand published his first work in prose, the Essai sur les révolutions,
an enormous and ambitious comparative history of revolutions as cyclic phenomena.
The panoramic essay ends unexpectedly with a lyrical final chapter entitled ‘‘Nuit
chez les sauvages de l’Amérique’’ where the author recalls his experience of the
sublime. This famous final scene pre-empts the closure of history, by refusing to
perceive history as a sealed, apoetical story. Contrary to appearances, the Essai is not a
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farewell to the Muses, an abandonment of poetry for history, but a gesture towards a
poetry compatible with the necessity of, and the need for, historical consciousness.
While in exile, Chateaubriand also delved into British literature, commenting on
and translating personal favorites, published upon his return to France in a series of
articles for the Mercure de France (1802) and later grouped in an expanded Essai sur la
littérature anglaise (1836). In addition to Young and Shakespeare, he selected the
lesser-known James Beattie whose Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius combined the
divine poet and the genius-child in the Scottish shepherd Edwin. Chateaubriand was
drawn to other bardic figures. Thomas Gray’s defiant bard (The Bard. A Pindaric Ode,
1751), the last spokesman of Welsh independence, conveyed the anger, sorrow, and
rebellion of those who had fallen victim to history, as many in France’s postrevolutionary society. Chateaubriand also translated John Smith, a skillful imitator of
Macpherson’s Ossian. For the 25-year-old Chateaubriand, exiled by the gory aftermath
of the Revolution, Ossian’s mournful accents, which he so enjoyed as a youth, assumed
a powerful immediacy: the importance of history in forging and maintaining one’s
identity; the crucial role of memory in preserving the past; the threat of erasure by
time and death; the survivor’s duty to record and testify. Ossian portrayed a devastated
landscape of tombs and ruins similar to postrevolutionary France, and expressed
similarly painful loss and regret in the wake of an historical trauma. From the fall
of the ancien régime to the first-hand discovery of the Indians’ tragedy triggered by
European conquest, Chateaubriand’s early experience of loss was compounded by an
exceptionally long yet childless life, which subjected him to witnessing the death of
his own generation without begetting a new one, leaving him its sole survivor.
The only voice apt to convey the pervasive sadness of these memories belongs to the
elegiac bard, the central archetype of Chateaubriand’s life and work. The bard’s
historical, sociocultural, and mythopoetic role, and the interpretive lyrics and music
called for by this role, sums up the origins and destiny of a people. Milton’s success in
recounting the foundational narrative of Christian religion, Genesis, and his account
of the first, the most ineluctable, and most tragic of all prophecies – humankind’s
subsequent, never-ending Fall – places him at the pinnacle of Chateaubriand’s
pantheon of bards. Begun in England, his remarkable translation of Paradise Lost
was eventually completed 35 years later in 1835.
When time came for appeasement, Chateaubriand hoped to repair with the Génie
du christianisme (1802) the torn link between the French and their traditions, and
easily substituted biblical hymns for the Gaelic bard’s songs, contrasting David’s
peaceful lyrics with a violent, haunting past. But the Génie du christianisme was also
written to atone for the impious, pessimistic Essai, which reportedly hastened his
mother’s death. The Génie formulates the essential principles of Chateaubriand’s
poetics, building a ‘‘théologie poétique’’ from the best Christian literature. Christian
religion created the conditions for heightened moral conflicts, illustrated in modern
epic poems and tragedies; furthermore, Christian religion, by chasing away mythology, revealed nature’s true sublime, the source of modern descriptive poetry.
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Notwithstanding his celebration of Christianity, Chateaubriand cannot easily be
classified as a traditionalist. His deep pessimism is not mere nostalgia but an
existential angst in the face of topsy-turvy social and moral values and a weakening
of religious faith. In a departure from the Catholic creed, Chateaubriand conceived
Christian genius as predominantly the genius of melancholy, without hope or promise
of redemption. The yearning for an indefinable ideal causes frustration and loneliness:
Chateaubriand identifies this disenchantment as a modern phenomenon, born of the
discrepancy between over abundant knowledge and lack of experience. The character
René will epitomize ‘‘cet état du vague des passions’’ (the vagueness or ‘‘unsettled state’’ of
the passions) which consumes the self (Chateaubriand 1976b: 296-8).
Chateaubriand inserted in the Génie du christianisme the stories of Atala and René as
‘‘illustrations’’ of his main thesis, then easily extracted them the better to promote
their originality and showcase his talent. Atala appeared in 1801, a year earlier than
the publication of the Génie, and its success paved the way for the enthusiastic
reception of the Génie. The original framework of the two stories, however, was the
unfinished American manuscript of Les Natchez, eventually revised 25 years later. This
complex genealogy – from two episodes within an epic-like narrative, to illustrations
of an aesthetic treatise on religion, then autonomous, albeit unclassifiable, stories –
creates ambiguous, multilayered narratives. Atala, a christened Indian, falls in love
with the prisoner Chactas captured by her Natchez tribe. They escape into the
wilderness, eventually reaching the Catholic mission of Father Aubry. The lovers’
initial delight at discovering a common bond (Chactas was adopted by Atala’s
European father after the latter was forced to leave her mother), is soon burdened
by a secret guilt which forbids Atala’s union with Chactas. After poisoning herself,
Atala confesses that she vowed on her mother’s deathbed to remain a virgin. Father
Aubry condemns the promise as invalid and the sacrifice misguided, but Atala
expires. In the epilogue the narrator encounters the last survivors of the Natchez
tribe who inform him that Chactas and Father Aubry perished in the Louisiana
massacre perpetrated by the French.
In René, an older Chactas is now the sage to whom René, a Frenchman in selfimposed exile, confides his own unhappy story, a confession triggered by a letter
announcing his sister Amélie’s death. Amélie’s soulmate in childhood, René grows
apart from her under the pressure of ill-defined feelings and inarticulate longings.
Neither traveling abroad nor settling back in France cures his ennui and disgust for
life. Amélie returns when her brother’s despair puts him on the brink of suicide, but
she eventually falls prey to a mysterious ailment, which leads her to withdraw to a
convent. The climactic scene occurs as a powerless René watches the ceremony of his
sister’s religious vow-taking and hears her whisper her criminal passion for her
brother.
The twin stories captured the imagination of Europe and met with phenomenal
success. Atala and René represented contrasting aspects of the new character later
called ‘‘Romantic’’ whose inner torment mirrors a society in the grip of crisis. Set
during the corrupted Regency years following Louis XIV’s death in 1715, the
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narrative in effect recalls the traumatic aftermath of the 1789 Revolution. René the
European suffers from an agitation without purpose, contradictory impulses that
exhaust his wanderlust without achieving peace of mind or heart. For ‘‘[t]he heart is
a defective instrument, a lyre lacking strings’’ (Chateaubriand 1980: 80). The halfIndian Atala is alienated like René, she commits suicide like Werther, but she is other,
foreign, a modern, split subject, a ‘‘métisse’’ (half-caste) who bears the memory of the
colonial takeover. This hybridity is embedded in the story’s odd style, alternating
between the narrator’s descriptive prose and the characters’ metaphoric language
meant to convey their ‘‘primitive’’ voices. Chateaubriand’s rhythmic, ternary periods
convey the majesty of the wilderness whereas parataxis, namely short, declarative
sentences without conjunctions or coordination, transcribes a ‘‘parler sauvage’’ that
sound paradoxically stilted to our modern ears, and might explain Atala’s fall from
grace in today’s literary cannon. By contrast, René’s unbridled expression of vacuity
echoes in countless modern dramas.
Catastrophe looms large on Chateaubriand’s horizon: struck by the loss of loved
ones to the Revolution, obsessed by ruins of literary and political fame (Byron,
Napoleon), tormented by history’s fateful turns (the downfall of the Indians, the
twilight of the Enlightenment), Chateaubriand always contemplated the Fall, the
ultimate unhappy ending. The Fall is both the premise and the conclusion of Les
Martyrs and Les Natchez, two epic frescoes in prose, the former opposing pagans and
Christians in third-century Gaul, the latter North-American Indians and Europeans.
The emotional struggles of their respective protagonists, Eudore and René, their
suicidal passivity, their weakening under the burden of exile, their secret wounds, cast
them as prototypical antiheroes, and ‘‘Romantic’’ characters. This character assumes
yet a different temperament when of the opposite sex: Velléda (Brittany’s last bard in
Les Martyrs) and Mila (René’s sister-in-law) are passionate, proud, resolute, active, yet
ultimately fall victim to their passion and suffer a similarly tragic fate to their male
counterparts.
After the disappointment of Les Martyrs in 1809, Chateaubriand officially bade
farewell to the muse of poetry and engaged history by becoming a political actor from
1814 until 1830. Even before he recorded his extraordinary life as an epic journey in
the autobiographical Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1844), a 14-year-old Victor Hugo proclaimed in his 1816 diary: ‘‘I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing.’’
An irreconcilable thematic and stylistic duality at the core of Les Martyrs and Les
Natchez condemned them to a critical purgatory, which has lasted to this day. In each
text, the conflict exploded between the epic and the novel, between poetry and prose,
Classicism and Romanticism. Indeed Les Martyrs and Les Natchez are the site of a
fundamental hesitation between allegiance to the ancients or to the new Romantic
spirit, a hesitation staged as a mise en abyme: while relating the decline of Indian tribes
and Christian martyrdom, both epic poems seem to ask: is Romanticism a Fall? Is
Classicism paradise lost? Chateaubriand’s art mirrors his position in letters, poised on
the brink of Romanticism, but steeped in Classicism: ‘‘mon poème se ressent des lieux
qu’il a fréquenté: le classique y domine le romantique’’ (Chateaubriand 1961a: I, 637).8
188
Fabienne Moore
Long outliving Staël and Byron, Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs acutely aware of
having begun a ‘‘school,’’ but remained divided about his followers.
Senancour (1770-1846): The Invisible Romantic
It seems fitting to end with a case emblematic of the ironies of posterity when it
comes to the French early Romantics. When Étienne Pivert de Senancour published
his epistolary novel Oberman in 1804, the drawn-out, brooding meditations of the lone
protagonist failed to capture readers’ interests. Thirty years elapsed before the critic
Sainte-Beuve and the novelist George Sand wrote articles which turned into prefaces
for new editions of Obermann in 1833 and 1840, bringing the novel back to life, albeit
briefly. It inspired Sainte-Beuve’s novel Volupté (1834) and Sand’s Lélia (1833), as well
as the composer Liszt,9 the poet Gérard de Nerval, and Balzac’s early novels, in
particular Le Lys dans la Vallée (Lily of the Valley; [1835] 1997). Matthew Arnold
wrote two fervent poems in homage to the author of Obermann,10 and also reviewed
the book, praising Senancour’s ‘‘austere and sad sincerity,’’ casting him as the quintessential Shakespearean tragic character: ‘‘as deep as his sense that the time was out of
joint, was the feeling of this Hamlet that he had no power to set it right’’ (Arnold
1960: 157, 160).
With the passage of time, the original confessional, tormented lyricism seemed by
then worn on everyone’s sleeve, a mere fashion distasteful to its fathers. It provoked
Senancour to revise and tone down his one and only novel in 1833, just as Chateaubriand, at exactly the same time, was compulsively footnoting his works in view of
their first complete edition. The confrontation of these amended versions has not
sufficiently been called upon to understand the conflicted rapport of the early French
Romantics with their own creations and the generation who followed them.
Notes
1 Note that all translations are mine unless
otherwise indicated.
2 ‘‘La nature est une, comme la vérité: l’une ne
comporte pas plus que l’autre, l’épithète de
belle.’’ (‘‘Discours des Préfaces,’’ in Le Tourneur
1990a: cxxxiii).
3 See Souriau ([1927] 1973), which describes
Staël as inferior to Chateaubriand.
4 Her contemporaries never knew this private
correspondence. Her Lettres à M. de Guibert
were published in 1809.
5 Staël’s mother, Suzanne Curchod, had been the
historian Edmund Gibbon’s first and only love
but his father prohibited the marriage. Staël’s
6
7
8
9
father, Jacques Necker, was Louis XVI’s Finance Minister.
See Byron ([1821] 1991). Byron later visited
Coppet in 1816, but the Shelleys did
not, although they were staying close by in
the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake
Geneva where Mary Shelley began Frankenstein.
Staël had published her Reflexions sur le suicide
in 1813.
This judgment on Les Martyrs equally applies
to Les Natchez.
Liszt, ‘‘Les Années de pèlerinage: La Vallée
d’Oberman’’ and ‘‘Le Mal du pays’’ (1834).
Early French Romanticism
189
10 ‘‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’’’ (1852), ‘‘Obermann Once More’’
(1867). See Arnold (1986: 66-71, 252-63).
References and Further Reading
Primary sources
Arnold, Matthew ([1869] 1960). ‘‘Obermann.’’ In
Essays, Letters, and Reviews by Matthew Arnold,
ed. Fraser Neiman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, pp. 156-63.
Arnold, Matthew (1986). Poems. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Balzac, Honoré de (1997). Lily of the Valley, trans.
Lucienne Hill. New York: Caroll & Graf.
Byron, George Gordon (1991). ‘‘Some recollections
of my Acquaintance with Madame de Staël’’;
‘‘Marginalia in de Staël’s Corinne.’’ In The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 184-6, 222-4.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1902). The
Memoirs of François-René, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, 6 vols. New York: Putnam;
London: Freemantle.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1961a). Mémoires d’outre-tombe. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1961b). The
Memoirs of Chateaubriand. Selections, trans. and
ed. Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1969). Travels
in America, trans. Richard Switzer. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1976a). The
Genius of Christianity: or, The Spirit and Beauty
of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I. White.
New York: H. Fertig.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1976b). The
Martyrs, trans. and ed. O. W. Wight. New
York: Howard Fertig.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1980). Atala.
René, trans. Irving Putter. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1996). Atala.
René. Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage. Paris:
Flammarion.
Constant de Rebecque, Henri-Benjamin (1965).
Wallstein, tragédie en 5 actes et en vers, ed. JeanRené Derré. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Constant de Rebecque, Henri-Benjamin (1988).
The Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana. Cambridge, UK and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Constant de Rebecque, Henri-Benjamin (2001).
Adolphe, ed. Patrick Coleman, trans. Margaret
Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Delon, Michel (ed.) (1997). Anthologie de la poésie
française du dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Gallimard.
Gouges, Olympe de (1986). Oeuvres, ed. Benoı̂te
Groult. Paris: Mercure de France.
Lespinasse, Julie de (1997). Lettres, ed. Jacques
Dupont. Paris: La Table Ronde.
Le Tourneur, Pierre (trans.) (1776-83). Shakespeare
traduit de l’Anglois, 20 vols. Paris.
Le Tourneur, Pierre (1990a). Pierre Le Tourneur.
Préface du Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois, ed.
Jacques Gury. Geneva: Droz.
Le Tourneur, Pierre (1990b). Voyage à Ermenonville.
Paris: A l’Ecart.
Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian and Related
Works, ed. Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Martino, Pierre (1925). Stendhal. Racine et Shakespeare, vol. 1. Paris: Champion.
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (1999). Du théâtre ou
nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique. In Jean-Claude
Bonnet (ed.), Mon Bonnet de nuit. Suivi de Du
théâtre. Paris: Mercure de France, pp. 1126478.
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (1801). Néologie, ou Vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler ou pris dans
des acceptions nouvelles. Paris: Moussard et Maradan.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1990-2001). The Collected
Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and
Christopher Kelly, 9 vols. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997). Julie, or the New
Heloise. Letters of two lovers who live in a small town
at the foot of the Alps, ed. and trans. Philip
Stewart and Jean Vaché, vol. 6. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England.
190
Fabienne Moore
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2000). The Reveries of the
Solitary Walker, ed. Christopher Kelly, trans.
Charles E. Butterworth, Alexandra Cook, and
Terence E. Marshall, vol. 8. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1995). Volupté:
The Sensual Man, trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sand, George (1978). Lelia, ed and trans. Maria
Espinosa. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1965). Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John
Black. New York: AMS Press.
Sénancour, Étienne-Pivert de (2003). Obermann,
trans. Arthur Edward Waite. Kila, MT: RA
Kessinger Publishing Co.
Shelley, Mary (2002). ‘‘Madame de Staël. 17661817.’’ In Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Literary
Lives and Other Writings. Vol. 3. French Lives
(Molière to Madame de Staël). London: Pickering
and Chatto, pp. 457-94.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1861). ‘‘De l’esprit des traductions.’’ In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2.
Paris: Didot, pp. 294-7.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1964). Madame
de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, ed. and trans. Morroe Berger. New York:
Doubleday.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1968). De l’Allemagne, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1987). Major Writings of Germaine de Staël. [originally published as
An Extraordinary Woman. Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël], trans. and ed. Vivian Folkenflik.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1991). De la
Littérature. Paris: Gallimard.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1995). Delphine,
trans. Avriel Goldberger. De Kalb: Northern
Illinois University Press.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (1998). Corinne, or
Italy, trans. and ed. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de (2000). Ten Years
of Exile, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger. De Kalb:
Northern Illinois University Press.
Stendhal (Henri Beyle) (1962). Racine and Shakespeare, trans. Guy Daniels. New York: CrowellCollier Press.
Secondary sources
Balayé, Simone (1968). ‘‘Benjamin Constant lecteur de Corinne.’’ In Pierre Cordey and Jean-Luc
Seylaz (eds.), Benjamin Constant. Acte du Congrès
de Lausanne. Geneva: Droz, pp. 189-99.
Bénichou, Paul (1996). Le Sacre de l’écrivain. 17501830. Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel
laı̈que dans la France moderne. Paris: Gallimard.
Bowman, Frank Paul (1999). ‘‘The Specificity of
French Romanticism.’’ In Andrea Ciccarelli,
John C. Isbell, and Brian Nelson (eds.), The
People’s Voice. Essays on European Romanticism.
Clayton, Melbourne: Monash University,
pp. 74-88.
Delon, Michel (1988). L’Idée d’énergie au tournant
des Lumières (1770-1820). Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Ceserani, Remo (1999). ‘‘The New System of Literary Modes in the Romantic Age.’’ In Andrea
Ciccarelli, John C. Isbell, and Brian Nelson
(eds.), The People’s Voice. Essays on European Romanticism. Clayton, Melbourne: Monash University, pp. 7-25.
Fabre, Jean (1980). Lumières et romantisme. Energie et
nostalgie de Rousseau à Mickiewicz. Paris: Klincksieck.
Finch, M. B. and Peers, E. Allison (1920). The
Origins of French Romanticism. London: Constable.
Herold, Christopher (2002). Mistress to an Age. A
Life of Madame de Staël. New York: Grove Press.
Isbell, John C. (1994). The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘‘De
l’Allemagne.’’ Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
King, Everard H. (1984). ‘‘Beattie’s The Minstrel
and the French Connection.’’ Scottish Literary
Journal, II (2): 36-53.
Gutwirth, Madelyn (1978). Madame de Staël, Novelist. The Emergence of the Artist as Woman.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Gutwirth, Madelyn, Goldberger, Avriel and
Szmurlo, Karyna (1991). Germaine de Staël.
Crossing the Borders. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Minski, Alexander (1998). Le Préromantisme. Paris:
Colin.
Monglond, André (1965). Le Préromantisme français. Paris: Corti.
Early French Romanticism
Mornet, Daniel (1912). Le Romantisme en France au
dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Hachette.
Mortier, Roland (1982). L’Originalité. Une nouvelle
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Souriau, Maurice (1973). Histoire du romantisme en
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191
Van Tieghem, Paul (1967). Ossian en France, 2 vols.
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Van Tieghem, Paul (1973). Le Préromantisme.
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Viallaneix, Paul (ed.) (1975). Le Préromantisme:
hypothèque ou hypothèse? Colloque Clermont-Ferrand. 20-30 juin 1972. Paris: Klinckseick.
Viatte, Auguste (1979). Les Sources occultes du
Romantisme. Illuminisme, théosophie. 1770-1820,
2 vols. Paris: Champion.
11
The Poetry of Loss: Lamartine,
Musset, and Nerval
Jonathan Strauss
French Romantic poetry is generally considered to have begun in 1820, with the
publication of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations). This
slim collection of 24 poems immediately won a breathtaking commercial success,
running through seven editions within its first year, and awakened in the public
emotions that until then had not found expression. As Lamartine would later write, ‘‘I
am the first to have brought poetry down from Parnassus, to have given to what used
to be called the muse, instead of a lyre with seven conventional strings, the very fibers
of man’s heart, touched and shaken by the innumerable shudderings of the soul and of
nature’’ (Lamartine 1968: 303, my translation).1 Some 12 years later, the young poet
Alfred de Musset would recall a friend’s reaction: ‘‘You struck your brow, on reading
Lamartine / Édouard, you blanched like a gambler abandoned by luck’’ (Musset 1957:
128). In Musset’s subsequent commentary on this response, which seems to record
more a projection of the poet’s own attitudes than a faithful description of his friend
Édouard Bocher’s, two competing impulses seem forced together: on the one hand the
jubilatory discovery that one’s most intimate feelings could be the essential matter of
poetry and, on the other, a violent sense of rivalry with other poets’ expressions of
their own interiority. Lamartine himself, however, kept largely aloof from these
jealousies and disputes, as well as from the competing parties and cénacles that divided
the tumultuous Parisian literary scene. Although some of his later poems, especially
the lyric novel Jocelyn, enjoyed considerable success and he pursued a political career
that reached its apogee in 1848, when he effectively, if briefly, became the French head
of state, Lamartine’s later works never struck the same nerve that his first book had,
and his poetry was soon relegated to that dusky realm of literature that is seldom read
but will forever be anthologized. In 1871, Arthur Rimbaud would look back and
comment, ‘‘Lamartine is sometimes visionary, but strangled by the old forms’’
(Rimbaud 1972: 253). Even Marius-François Guyard, the editor of the authoritative
version of Lamartine’s poetry wrote, some 40 years ago: ‘‘My poet is dreadfully dated’’
(Lamartine 1963: ix).
The Poetry of Loss
193
It is difficult now to understand the violence of the emotions that Lamartine’s
poems unleashed, but even a critic like M.-F. Guyard, who denied that they changed
anything at all, still recognized, paradoxically, the originality in their ‘‘new music.’’2
Some of their force undoubtedly came from discovering the value of one’s own
feelings, from the rush of personal freedom and validation, from the revelation that,
unlike Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, in one’s soul one had been speaking poetry all
along. As the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued, at about the same time that
the Méditations appeared: ‘‘as the center and proper content of lyric poetry there must
be placed the poetic concrete person, the poet’’ (Hegel 1975, II: 1129). Part of the
reason for Lamartine’s eclipse probably stems from the very success of his poetry: the
revolution that he had helped bring about was so quickly complete that there was no
need to return to it. Its new aesthetic of individual plenitude had become so normal
that even a writer with a sensibility as different as Rimbaud’s could argue, some 50
years later, that ‘‘the first matter of study for a man who wants to be a poet is
knowledge of himself, in his entirety; he looks for his soul . . . it is a matter of making
his soul monstrous’’ (Rimbaud 1972: 251). On the other hand, the very reminder that
this plenitude (a word that Rimbaud uses in this passage to describe the goal of
poetry) could require a revolution, that it had to be achieved and imposed by another
poet, contradicted its very idea by making it contingent on an outside force. To be
consistent with himself, Lamartine was obliged, in this sense, to disappear. Conversely, and paradoxically, after his first success, this poet of emotions could only be
interesting to a readership that was not emotionally invested in his work, or that did
not take its ideological pretensions at face value.
That readership has been long in coming and may not yet have appeared. Hegel had
already described the failure of Romanticism – and with it, of art – as an excess of
subjective interiority, and this attitude has retained its currency and, indeed, become a
cliché (see, e.g., Hegel 1975, I: 586). The entry on French literature in a recent
edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, for example, states bluntly that ‘‘Romantic
writers were extremely self-centered’’ (Brosman 2002: 522). If a certain queasiness,
like a sense of shame at their exhibitionism, has attached itself to these authors, such
that Rimbaud, for example, can only accept their project if the exposed self becomes
monstrous, that queasiness probably also betrays subsequent generations’ desire to
hide the pleasures of the self and thereby protect them. Precisely because they have
attained the status of inaugural work, Lamartine’s Méditations remind any readers who
would take them seriously of both the historical facticity of the individual they
portray and the possibility that that individual may exist only as an object of
(narcissistic) desire.
But were one to look attentively at the way French Romantic poetry constructs a
sense of self, it would soon become apparent that the subject of these works is obsessed
by its incompleteness, which takes the specific form of loss. These poems are fixated
on death and bereavement. The very first of the Méditations is entitled ‘‘L’Isolement’’
(Isolation), but it does not conjure up images of self-fulfillment or subjective
wholeness. Instead, it speaks of sadness and dispossession, the feeling that the world
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Jonathan Strauss
has lost its charm and that one lives on in it as if after one’s own death. The cause of
this dejection, this wound to the solitary self, comes from the absence of another –
indeed of a single other, and that specificity is emphasized in one of the most striking
lines of French poetry: ‘‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’’ (A single
being is gone, and all is empty; 1963: 6). The heart of isolation, as this poem depicts
it, is the sense of loss, and it is the lost object, rather than the self, that contains
within it the plenitude of existence, that envelops in its disappearance the whole of
humanity and life. The other contains the completeness of the world. And that other
is unique in the sense that he or she cannot be replaced, that there is nothing else in
the world that can restore the world.
On the one hand, the loss of the beloved is both catastrophic and inevitable, the
tragedy at the core of human existence. As Lamartine writes of ‘‘Man’’: ‘‘Il veut aimer
toujours, ce qu’il aime est fragile!’’ (He wants to love forever; what he loves is fragile!;
1963: 6). And yet, on the other hand, the poet seems to be in a strange hurry to reach
this catastrophe. He almost never lingers on scenes with his beloved, and on the rare
occasions that he does, this human contact is generally depicted as a memory evoked
in mourning, which is to say, as an absence rather than a presence. The poem ‘‘Le Lac’’
(The Lake), Lamartine’s most famous work and the most certain guarantee of his
permanence in the French canon, describes a missed meeting between lovers. It is, as
virtually every French schoolchild knows, based on events in the poet’s own life – his
passion for a young woman named Julie Charles, their intention to meet at Aix-lesBains, where they had already spent time together at the Le Bourget lake, the illness
that prevented her from keeping their appointment, her subsequent death. The poem
revisits the site of the lovers’ happiness as seen through the eyes of the poet, who has
returned alone to the lake. As Barbara Johnson has observed, however, nothing in the
elegiac tone of the poem, nothing in its sense of tragedy and finality, would lead one
to suspect that Julie Charles, who only died several months after the missed rendezvous, was not already dead at the time ( Johnson 1989: 628). In this somewhat
unseemly haste to mourn his lover, Lamartine reveals a certain, crucial confusion in
the notion of loss. A missed appointment is tantamount to death. Every absence is
haunted by the absolute. And the validation, the preciousness of the individual,
derives in large part from this fragility, from the constant possibility that he or she
could disappear. Indeed, the sense of completeness in a single, other person seems to
come, for Lamartine, only when that person is gone.
Similarly, in ‘‘Isolement’’ it is impossible to determine whether the absent one is
dead or simply elsewhere. This categorical confusion between the passing and the
eternal, between individual and totality, is also evident in the lability with which
ostensibly irreplaceable love-objects can stand in for each other, for Lamartine’s poetry
is caught between mourning for a lost lover and yearning for an absent God. Like ‘‘Le
Lac,’’ ‘‘L’Isolement’’ appears at first to commemorate the disappearance of a loved
person, but the missing ‘‘being’’ it laments is never identified. Instead, it remains the
‘‘vague objet de mes vœux,’’ the ‘‘bien idéal que toute âme désire, / Et qui n’a pas de
nom au terrestre séjour!’’ (the ‘‘vague object of my prayers,’’ the ‘‘ideal good that each
The Poetry of Loss
195
soul desires / And that has no name on earth!’’; 1963: 4). And if what human beings
love is fragile, in the poem ‘‘L’Homme’’ (Man), it is because
Tout mortel est semblable à l’exilé d’Eden:
Lorsque Dieu l’eut banni du céleste jardin,
Mesurant d’un regard les fatales limites. (Lamartine 1963: 6)
(Every mortal is like the exile from Eden:
When God cast him out from the heavenly garden,
Measuring with a glance the limits of his doom.)
The identity of the unique and absent being has slipped from another person to God,
and loss has changed from the disappearance of a lover to a banishment from the
divine – a passage that has been facilitated by the transcendence of the beloved, for
insofar as she is irreplaceable, she is of an incalculable, an infinite value.
While Lamartine’s reputation hangs on a single love elegy, the emphasis of his lyric
production as a whole is religious, especially in his subsequent works. And as the object
of desire shifts from a perishable person to an immortal God, the value of all that is
transient suffers. Increasingly, he uses the word ‘‘néant’’ (nothingness) to designate the
material world. At first, the term refers to the opposite of being, the constant threat of
irreversible destruction that hangs over natural existence. In the poem ‘‘L’Immortalité’’
(Immortality) Lamartine asks, ‘‘Au néant destinés, / Est-ce pour le néant que les êtres
sont nés?’’ (To nothingness sworn / Is it for this nothingness that all creatures are born?;
1963: 18) and in ‘‘Stances’’ (Stanzas) he speaks of ‘‘Celui qui du néant a tiré la matière’’
(He who from nothingness brought forth matter; 1963: 167). In a later poem, ‘‘Éternité
de la nature’’ (Eternity of nature), he will write, however, that ‘‘Je sens en moi-même
mon néant’’ (I feel my nothingness in me; 1963: 466), indicating that the void is no
longer a pure and insensible category or a simple ontological absolute, but has become
something a person can feel, like an absence. The subject himself, moreover, identifies
with that nonexistence, as if he were not so much a speaking being as a speaking
nothing. ‘‘Mon âme,’’ he writes a couple of pages later, pursuing this idea, ‘‘est une mort
qui se sent et se souffre’’ (My soul is a death that feels and suffers itself; 1963: 481). This
emptiness then spreads out beyond the subject: ‘‘On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le
néant’’ (At the bottom of everything one finds nothingness and void; 1963: 475), until
it poisons existence itself: ‘‘Mourir! ah! ce seul mot fait horreur de la vie!’’ (Dying! ah!
the word alone fills life with horror!; 1963: 480).
It is not merely cataclysmic that this subject be lost, it is also unbearable. All that is
not God becomes an object of revulsion. But Lamartine was writing in the aftermath of
the Enlightenment and the Revolution, from a generation that had witnessed, if only in
a spasm of anarchic terror, the institutionalization of God’s death. It was against this that
Lamartine had to assert his own religious convictions, and as early as the Méditations he
explicitly rejected the godless, materialist world that discoveries in physics had suggested to many eighteenth-century philosophers. According to the poem ‘‘L’Homme,’’
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he himself passed through a stage of rationalist atheism, during which ‘‘J’étudiai la loi
par qui roulent les cieux: / Dans leurs brillants déserts Newton guida mes yeux’’ (I
studied the laws that govern the skies: / In their bright wastes Newton guided my eyes;
1963: 7). These doubts led ultimately to the conviction that those skies were not, in fact,
deserted and that their laws did not derive from the soulless combinations of material
forces. Still, the fear that God too could die never stopped haunting Lamartine’s
writings. And sometimes this fear really is like a haunting, an absent utterance that
presses, unseen, against what is written and changes it. It can be a single word that slips
in fragments through the verses, as in the ‘‘Hymne au Christ’’ (Hymn to Christ):
Pour moi, soit que ton nom ressuscite ou succombe,
O Dieu de mon berceau, sois le Dieu de ma tombe!
Plus la nuit est obscure et plus mes faibles yeux
S’attachent au flambeau qui pâlit dans les cieux. (Lamartine 1963: 415)
(For me, whether your name succumbs or relives,
O God of my cradle, be the God my tomb gives!
The darker the night, the more my weak eyes
Seek out the pale torch that illumines the skies.)
The word ‘‘tombeau’’ (tomb) almost always accompanies ‘‘flambeau’’ (torch) in
Lamartine’s poetry, as if the two terms were necessarily linked in his imagination,
like light and dark, loss and restitution, death and resurrection. But there is not a
single ‘‘tombeau’’ in this long poem, and instead, its cognate, ‘‘tombe’’ replaces it
throughout. Here, in the last lines, however, the longer version of the word is evoked
by the return of the ‘‘flambeau’’ two lines after ‘‘tombe.’’ Unnecessary for the rhyme, it
still lingers in proximity to the remnants of its missing partner, conjuring up an
effaced tomb, a lost marker of loss that binds the imagery together in a condensed
theogony of despair redeemed.
This poem is marked – literally – by the erasure of an even greater loss. A passage
in it of 20 lines contemplates the death of God. Beginning with the question, ‘‘Et tu
meurs?’’ (And you die?) addressed to the divinity, it goes on to imagine a world in
which the revelations of Christ had become as vacant of meaning as the pagan beliefs
they had once replaced. Although it was finally reintegrated into published versions
of the poem, this whole section is crossed out in the manuscript. In an anxious,
wavering gesture, a doubt is expressed, cancelled out, then let stand: ‘‘Et tu meurs?’’ It
is a doubt, moreover, that worries at all of Lamartine’s poetry. Had he been convinced
of God’s immortality, it seems unlikely he would have felt the need to prove it as often
as he did, but the alternative is intolerable: the world of absolute dispossession of
‘‘L’Isolement,’’ in which pleasures have been emptied of their charm, relations of their
meaning, and life reduced to a sort of sentient death.
Paul Bénichou has argued that ‘‘in the great French Romantic poetry, there is no
unhappy love, except with Musset’’ (Bénichou 1992: 103, emphasis in original). ‘‘The
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death of Elvire,’’ he explains for those who might be puzzled by this statement, ‘‘is
not, for Lamartine, a misfortune of love: he knows that he has been loved and he
believes that he continues to be loved in heaven’’ (ibid.). Although Lamartine himself
does not seem to have shared the great critic’s sunny confidence about his love life,
Bénichou has put his finger on a crucial element in his poetics: God’s existence is a
palliative and cure for the loss of a loved one. The only problem, of course, is that God
may not exist.
And Bénichou is right that Alfred de Musset’s relation to love is different from
everything that had preceded it. For all their apparent callowness, Musset’s sufferings in
love force a rethinking of the question of loss, shifting it away from the problem of
God’s existence and changing its significance as an ontological category. Born 20 years
after Lamartine, he was, even by the standards of his young cohort, remarkable for his
precociousness. A frail dandy with fine features, a nervous, embittered sensibility, and a
gift for writing sinuous verses, Musset has often struck readers as a superficial and
narcissistic poet. Lamartine publicly heaped scorn on him, addressing him in verse as an
Enfant aux blonds cheveux, jeune homme au cœur de cire,
Dont la lèvre a le pli des larmes ou du rire,
Selon que la beauté qui règne sur tes yeux
Eut un regard hier sévère ou gracieux. (Lamartine 1963: 1209)
(Blond-haired child, young man with a heart of wax,
Whose lip bends to the folds of tears or laughs
According as the beauty who reigns over your eyes
Had yesterday a severe or a gracious look.)
and then upbraiding him with the stern lesson that ‘‘celui qui rit de l’enfance au
tombeau / De l’immortalité porte mal le flambeau’’ (whoever laughs from childhood
to the tomb / Bears ill the torch of immortality; p. 1210).
Lamartine was responding to a poem that Musset had addressed to him and in which
the young man had tried to reorient the idea of death away from the question of God:
Qu’est-ce donc qu’oublier si ce n’est pas mourir?
Ah! c’est plus que mourir; c’est survivre à soi-même.
L’âme remonte au ciel quand on perd ce qu’on aime.
Il ne reste de nous qu’un cadavre vivant;
Le désespoir l’habite, et le néant l’attend. (Musset 1957: 333)
(What then is forgetting if not to die?
Ah! more than death, it’s surviving oneself.
The soul returns to heaven when one loses what one loves.
Nothing is left of us but a living corpse;
Despair inhabits it and the void awaits it.)
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Many of the older poet’s terms are in play here: despair and nothingness, the idea of
existence as a living death. But the relations of causality have reversed. No longer is
loss – or, here, ‘‘forgetting’’ – a result of death, but rather death a result of loss. One
is not forgotten because one dies, but instead, one dies in that one is forgotten. This is
particularly evident in Musset’s description of the ‘‘nuit d’horreur et de détresse’’
(night of horror and distress) in which a lover abandoned him:
O toi qui sais aimer, réponds, amant d’Elvire,
Comprends-tu que l’on parte et qu’on se dise adieu?
Comprends-tu que ce mot, la main puisse l’écrire,
Et le cœur le signer, et les lèvres le dire
[...]
Comprends-tu qu’un lien qui, dans l’âme immortelle,
Chaque jour plus profond se forme à notre insu;
[...]
Un lien tout-puissant dont les nœuds et la trame
Sont plus durs que la roche et que les diamants;
Qui ne craint ni le temps, ni le fer, ni la flamme
Ni la mort elle-même, et qui fait des amants
Jusque dans le tombeau s’aimer les ossements;
Comprends-tu que dix ans ce lien nous enlace,
Qu’il ne fasse dix ans qu’un seul être de deux,
Puis tout à coup se brise, et, perdu dans l’espace,
Nous laisse épouvantés d’avoir cru vivre heureux? (Musset 1957: 332)
(O you who know how to love, respond, Elvire’s lover,
Do you understand how one can part and say adieu?
Do you understand how this word, the hand can write it,
And the heart sign it, and the lips speak it
[...]
Do you understand how a bond that, in the immortal soul,
Each day deeper is formed without our knowing –
[...]
An all-powerful bond whose knots and weave
Are harder than rock and diamonds,
That fears neither time nor iron nor flame
Nor death itself, and makes lovers
Even in the tomb love each other’s bones –
Do you understand how for ten years this bond holds us,
How for ten years it makes one being of two,
Then suddenly it breaks, and disappearing into space,
Leaves us horrified to have thought we were living in happiness?)
The single word that made life an object of horror for Lamartine was ‘‘mourir’’ (dying;
1963: 480). But here, death does not really seem to trouble Musset, who imagines,
anyway, a love that is stronger. For him, instead, the word of horror is ‘‘Adieu,’’ and it
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drives him to a stunned incomprehension, a stuttering failure even to pose adequately
the question of its possibility and significance. ‘‘Adieu’’ emerges from these lines as a
nonsense that cannot be integrated into meaningful life but that is nonetheless
experienced in that life, like some painful epistemological wound. Even in the term
itself, there is a rejection of Lamartine’s laborious piety of redeemed loss: to wait until
God rejoins the lovers, or to be ‘‘à Dieu’’ (literally ‘‘to God’’) rather than each other, is
meaningless.
Musset’s reversal reconciles his poetry with what one might call a strong conception
of death, or death understood as sheer nonexistence. This was an outlook that had
gained ground and then been institutionalized under the Revolution of 1789, when
Joseph Fouché, a député to the National Convention, had ordered that the gates to all
graveyards be inscribed with the words ‘‘Death is an eternal sleep’’ (Kselman 1993:
125-6). True, even unwaking sleep is not quite sheer nonbeing, and the purity of
death in Musset’s poem is troubled, too, by images of lovers embracing in the tomb.
Still, this is infinitely closer than Lamartine to death as an ontological absolute.
Nearly a century later, Ludwig Wittgenstein will write that ‘‘death is not an event in
life,’’ that its nothingness disappears from experience (Wittgenstein 1922: 185,
§6.4311). The philosopher Paul Edwards (1978) will argue that it cannot be considered a state, since nothingness does not exist and states are always states of being.
And Heidegger will make the certainty of absolute and impending demise the source
of human individuality (Heidegger 1962, especially pp. 279-311). But Musset opens
the conceptual space for absolute death within his poetry by rejecting its aesthetic and
intellectual interest. Unlike a Heidegger or a Lamartine, he does not make nonexistence a foundational category of experience. Instead, the mystery that haunts and
horrifies him is an interpersonal and psychological one: the possibility that one can
lose another person’s love. There is a certain almost Kantian intellectual integrity in
this move. For if death is nonexistence and if nonexistence brackets itself out of
experience, then what we can know of death can only be derived (or projected) from
actual experiences. We can know nothing of death in itself, not because it is heavily
guarded and mysterious, but because it is nothing, and what we can know, therefore,
is only life. But even that life, Musset argues, is riddled and torn by its own
incomprehensibilities. Viewed as superficial for not confronting issues like mortality
straight on, for turning instead to the sufferings of love, Musset has, in that very
turning, opened the possibility of a far more ontologically rigorous poetic enterprise,
and, at the same time, a far more human one. The uniqueness of the other is still
expressed in terms of loss, but the absolute value of that loss no longer derives from
the absoluteness of nonexistence or le néant. Instead it comes from within life. Loss
attains its ultimate significance not from the eternity of death but from the irreplaceability of the beloved. And death itself, from this perspective, is revealed to be a
derivative, a subcategory of loving separation, a psychological rather than an ontological concept.
The vehemence of Lamartine’s response to Musset is less surprising when one
considers that the younger poet is redefining loss in almost precisely the terms
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Lamartine had tried to avoid or repress: that the notion of absolute absence derives
from the loss of the beloved in her specificity and cannot, therefore, be palliated by the
presence of another, even if that other is God himself. And Musset offers no solution
for this problem: he simply plants himself – and his readers – before its incomprehensibility.
Gérard de Nerval was two years older and much more idiosyncratic a literary figure
than Musset. He belonged, early in his career, to a raucous group of young artists and
writers that included Théophile Gautier and who were variously known as the JeunesFrance, the Bousingos, or the petit cénacle (to distinguish them from the Cénacle itself,
which was headed by Victor Hugo). Among his contemporaries, Nerval was as famous
for the insanity that eventually led to his suicide as he was for his writings. Even his
friends tended to treat him with a certain supercilious compassion, because he was
genuinely a victim of the madness that many of the rest of them carefully affected.
The most enduring of his poetry, written near the end of his life, is hermetic and
strange, a dense fabric of complex allusions and references that often seems to fall
apart under the very pressure of its own impossible aspirations. His poetic output was
slight, a small fraction of his writings, which included stories, novellas, theater, travel
narratives, and drama criticism. Because of the opacity of his poetry and because there
is so little of it, with Nerval one is almost compelled to read his poems through his
other writings. And an abiding, preoriginal sense of loss pervades them.
This is particularly evident in the most famous of Nerval’s short stories, ‘‘Sylvie,’’
which recounts a series of unhappy love affairs on the part of the narrator. There is a
strange picture in the story, much commented on. It is strange because it is not there
and yet seems to sum up the whole text, to gather its narrative threads and echoing
characters, even its sense of time, into a single figure. ‘‘To me this half-dreamt
memory explained everything,’’ Nerval writes. ‘‘This vague, hopeless love I had
conceived for an actress, this love which swept me up every evening when the curtain
rose, only to release me when sleep finally descended, had its seed in the memory of
Adrienne, a night-flower blooming in the pale effulgence of the moon, a phantom fair
and rosy’’ (Nerval 1999: 150-1). Everything, he promises, is revealed in this return to
a hidden memory, to an original encounter, to this visitation by a ghost. There is a
key, he says, to his repeated attachments and it will release the meaning of this
apparently empty gesture of hopeless love. Then he tries to explain the connections
between that first visit and all its revisitings through a comparison: ‘‘This resemblance to a figure I had long forgotten was now taking shape with singular vividness;
it was a pencil sketch smudged by time that was now turning into a painting, like
those studies by the Old Masters that one has admired in some museum, only to
discover their dazzling original somewhere else’’ (1999: 151). But the original, the
key to all these insistent returns, disappears under the reader’s eyes, for two different
similes are being used here, and they do not quite match up. The forgotten image is a
faded drawing that turns into a painting, but it is also an old sketch that copies an
original. In the first case, the drawing precedes the painting that subsequently
repeats it. In the second, the drawing copies the painting. The copy is, in short,
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indistinguishable from the original – or rather is the original – and Nerval thus
plunges his story deep into the postmodern logic of the simulacrum, while his
inescapable ghost theater transforms itself into a preoriginally alienated society of
the spectacle (Newmark 1988: 211-12, 220-1).
These sorts of repetitions repeat themselves throughout his writings. Everywhere,
the figures of beloved women fade into one another, and seem to find their emblem in
the three Erinyes-like sisters of Aurélia, ‘‘the contours of whose faces varied like the
flame of a lamp, and at each moment something of the one passed into the other’’
(Nerval 1983-99, III: 708-9). One finds, in this same book, the stuttering creation
and recreation of the world, constantly striving and failing to begin. There is also the
line of rapacious kings who re-emerged from their own deaths ‘‘to be born again in the
form of a young child who was later called to empire’’ (ibid., p. 713). Even the ‘‘I’’
repeats itself in a fantasy of endless, all-consuming reincarnation in the preface to Les
Filles du feu (The Daughters of Fire): ‘‘At bottom, inventing is remembering, said a
moralist [ . . . ] From the moment I believed I had grasped the series of my previous
lives, it was as easy for me to have been a prince, a king, a magus, and even God; the
chain was broken and marked the hours as minutes’’ (Nerval 1984-93, III: 451). The
continuity binding the series of ‘‘I’’s breaks under their uncontrollable proliferation,
and in the chaos that ensues even the hours lose their value. How is one to determine
an original moment when time itself has given up its self-identity, when hours pass
for minutes? And yet this, ‘‘au fond’’ – at the bottom of things – is the moment of
invention, the instant of creation, the origin.
There is an anecdote, repeated in several places among Nerval’s writings, that
would seem to offer some insight into the meaning of all these echoes and returns, if
only because the story is about writing itself, about the field in and on which these
repetitions take place. As such, it marks a moment when the writing no longer tells
but is told, a moment in which the text, this theatre of ghosts, reflects on itself.
The scene appears in fragments and allusions throughout Nerval’s publications and
correspondence. It concerns the three men who, in the Nervalian cosmogony, are
responsible for the invention of printing, men whose ideas blend together to create a
miraculous event that none of them alone could have foreseen. But first among equals
is Faust, and it is to his name that Nerval most frequently returns when speaking of
the origins of typography. In a letter to a friend, two female personages also hover just
out of sight: one a ‘‘bourgeois woman who does not understand [Faust] and makes
him suffer, but who saves him by her religious feelings’’ and the other ‘‘the ideal
woman [ . . . ] the eternal dream of genius,’’ a Lilith figure who ultimately seeks to
frustrate the inventor’s work. And Nerval hesitates between two divergent impulses
behind the very idea of printing itself, stating at one moment that it had been
inspired by Satan and at another by divine providence (Nerval 1984-93, II: 1296).
It took, in short, a very dysfunctional and nonnuclear family to create the printing
press, but what the invention itself meant within this dynamic seems at least partially
decipherable. One version of the creation story is particularly telling. In it, the young
Faust delivers some work to monks in a scriptorium, where he finds them scraping the
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text from old manuscripts in order to recycle the pages underneath. He is horrified to
see one of the men beginning on the Iliad and in order to save what might have
been the only remaining copy of the poem, he purchases the book. ‘‘It was necessary
to have a document so that he could leave the monastery with the book. The prior
gave it to him graciously and imprinted his seal on the parchment. A ray of light
crossed [Faust’s] mind. He could shout ‘Eureka!’ like Archimedes. And must we
not see the hand of Providence in the combination of two ideas?’’ (Nerval 1984-93,
III: 50).
The psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier has argued that myths of origin are collective
versions of an attempt to answer a more personal question about the subject’s own
creation:
Now, whether it is an individual history or the history of subjects [in general], both
share the same requirement [ . . . ]. The first paragraph cannot show up as a series of
blank lines: if such were the case, all of the others would find themselves hanging on the
risk that one day a word, by being filled in there, could declare them all to be entirely
false. That is why, on the level of the history of subjects, one can say that all myths,
which are always the myth of an origin, have the function of guaranteeing the existence
of this first paragraph. (Aulagnier 1975: 227)
The subject was not there itself in the moment that, above all, interests it: the
moment when it was conceived. So the story must come from elsewhere, must remain
from a lost time: it is, in short, a text, like those that are being scraped away in the
scriptorium. ‘‘Il fallait un écrit’’ (It was necessary to have a document), as Nerval
writes.
Two ideas, long separated, join at last in this jubilant moment that drives an
involuntary cry from Faust. Eureka: I have found it! And what he has found is, on
some level, the psychoanalytic primal scene, the violent encounter when two forces
together conceive the new and give a terrifyingly fascinating answer to the question
‘‘where did I come from?’’
More important than the answer to a nagging mystery, however, is the motivation
leading up to this suddenly recovered episode: printing was created to protect against
an irreparable loss. This statement can be understood in two different but complementary senses: on the one hand, it means that the story of printing was invented by
Nerval to replace another lost origin that he could never recover, an origin more
important but forever irrecuperable: some scene involving, say, his mother, who died
before he knew her, or a primal scene in the Freudian sense. On the other hand,
printing itself is, in the author’s understanding, a way to prevent the loss of
something unique by copying it and, in that sense, denying its irreplaceability.
And so, when in another retelling of the discovery of printing, which pushes its
antiquity back to Spartan times, Nerval concludes that ‘‘there is nothing new under
the sun’’ (Nerval 1984-93, II: 49), he is also saying that nothing can disappear, since
everything is just a repetition. What the origin of printing, of ‘‘la lettre mobile’’
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(moveable type), stands in for is perhaps indeterminable, but the choice of proxy
argues that that very loss itself does not matter, that printing is just as good, that
nothing, therefore, was ever really lost.3
The concept of the simulacrum – in other words, the proposition that the original
is only a copy of its own copies, like the missing portrait in ‘‘Sylvie’’ – would serve as
an argument that nothing was, in fact, lost, and yet it still obliges one to account for
the notion of loss itself. We must still explain the need for an – even illusory – origin.
We could perhaps contend that as a subject Nerval is constructed to be preoriginally
dispossessed or ‘‘Desdichado,’’ and that loss consequently precedes the lost. This is
essentially Lacan’s argument about desire in ‘‘The Signification of the Phallus’’ (Lacan
1977): according to him, desire is a function of the structure of language itself, the
residue of the incompatibility between need and its expression. Because I am always
another in language, I can never quite say just what I, what just I, need. I am
preoriginally designed, in this view, as dispossession. But then, at the risk of naı̈ve
positivism, one might argue that something identifiable really is lost, and that this
lost object precedes the notion of loss. For although Lacan never states it as such, the
primary object of desire, the objet petit a, must be the missing I, the one that can never
be uttered, rather than any of the other interchangeable objects that devolve from it.
Or again, Julia Kristeva, in a variation on the objet petit a, sees all loss and dispossession as stemming out of an original separation from the mother’s body. That,
according to her, was the prelinguistic experience that we have lost in the postOedipal world of symbolic language.4
One does not have to identify the original lost object, however, to appreciate the
value and consequences of dissimulating its loss. By denying the irreplaceability of a
missing love object that object becomes the original object not of loss, but of the loss
of loss, and all subsequent repetitions – insofar as they foreclose on the possibility of
genuine dispossession – serve to reproduce that original loss of loss. This is why the
logic must be totalizing – why it is immediately as easy to be God as an insect, and
why one must conclude, in a story about origins, that ‘‘there is nothing new under the
sun.’’ Any genuine singularity, any rupture in the series of repetitions is a recognition
of the possibility of the original loss of loss, and therefore of the – now original – loss
itself. And the denial of a single loss thus becomes the loss of the singular, the
accidental, the unique as such. This is where the logic of the simulacrum leads, at least
for Nerval. The ‘‘I’’ is a heartless actress or a printing press.5
Nerval’s most famous poem, the dark and troubling sonnet ‘‘El Desdichado,’’
repeats this logic, slipping easily between the recognition and the denial of loss, as
emblematized in the almost effortless movement between the uniqueness of a star and
its proliferation.
Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
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Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ? . . . Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène . . .
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée. (Nerval 1984-93, III: 645)
(I am the dark one, – the widowed –, the disconsolate,
The prince of Aquitaine of the abolished tower:
My only star is dead, – and my constellated lute
Bears the black Sun of Melancholy.
In the night of the tomb, thou who hast consoled me,
Give me back Posilipo and the Italian sea,
The flower that so pleased my desolate heart,
And the trellis where the vine and rose unite.
Am I Love or Phœbus? . . . Lusignan or Byron?
My forehead is still red from the queen’s kiss;
I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims . . .
And I have twice in victory crossed the Acheron:
Tuning in turn on the Orphic lyre
The sighs of the saint and the fairy’s cries.)
‘‘My only star is dead, – and my constellated lute / Bears the black Sun of Melancholy’’:
the constellation covers over the dead étoile, obscuring its absence, while what
distinguishes it from a simple mass of stars, from the meaningless repetitions of
what Hegel called ‘‘the bad infinite,’’ is its form. The constellation consequently
represents two incompatible ways of denying absolute loss. On the one hand, the
multitude of stars contradicts the uniqueness of any single one. On the other, the
constellation’s very shape displaces the identity of the lost element onto the configuration of the field itself. It is not the individual units themselves that are irreplaceable, according to this thinking, but rather the forms that they together produce.
Generations of scholars have pondered over the references in this poem, unable,
except through the most painful contortions, to reconcile the different attributions
and self-identifications.6 But the figure of the constellation suggests that the poem
was written precisely to foreclose on any such reconciliation, so that the questions:
‘‘Am I Love or Phœbus . . . Lusignan or Byron?’’ for instance, should remain eternally
unanswered and the ‘‘I’’ flicker indeterminably among a series of alternative and
ostensibly mutually exclusive predications.
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The poem denies, in this way, the irreplaceable subjectivity of the poet. He, like the
star, can never be lost, because he never existed outside an endless proliferation of
interchangeable identities. And yet, in a contradictory gesture, in a gesture toward
acknowledging the singularity of what is lost, the poet characterizes himself by that
very loss, as if it were the finality of his particular being: ‘‘the dark one, – the
widowed –, the disconsolate’’ – as if, in fact, there were no consolation possible and
that open wound were the identificatory mark of the poet, the key to his subjectivity.
The poem makes two divergent arguments, then: nothing is lost and I am nothing
but loss. And then it performs a third operation. In the shape itself of the poem – and
Nerval’s Chimères (Chimerae) are almost all sonnets, as if to underscore the importance
of their formality – the poem becomes, like the constellation, a substitute for the
irreparable loss of the poet, a fetish object to sustain the self-imposed wounds of a
discontinuous or eternally absent subject. ‘‘Tuning in turn on the Orphic lyre,’’ the
poet creates a prosthesis on which to sustain the endless circulation of two noncompossible subject positions, in one of which he denies his singularity and in the other of
which he dispossesses himself of it by identifying with an intolerable loss. In the first
case there is nothing to lose, in the second it cannot be regained.
As a talisman that protects the subject even in the face of a terrifyingly fragile
singularity, the sonnet ‘‘El Desdichado’’ represents not only Nerval’s personal attempts
to deal with the problem of absolute loss, but also similar struggles on the part of an
entire period. For a thread weaves through these three poets and, indeed, through the
whole Romantic movement: a belief in the transcendental value of a single person
because of his or her singularity. Inseparable from this belief, however, is a new,
transcendental fear: that this person, whether it be another (as in the case of Lamartine
and Musset) or the self (as with Nerval), can be irretrievably lost. The moment a
person – or a star – becomes unique and therefore irreplaceable, his or her loss turns
definitive. What distinguishes this period from others that, like the Renaissance, have
exalted the individual is the way that the value of a person derives from the notion of
absolute loss, the fact that loss precedes the lost. This dispossession takes, as has been
seen, various forms. It is the death of a loved one or of God, as in Lamartine. It is the
end of a love affair, as in Musset. It is the ‘‘lettre mobile,’’ the missing page of selfidentity that haunts Nerval. In all of these cases, however, the work of poetry is to
express the individual, and that individual is revealed in turn as the product of an
absolute and unbearable absence.
This conception of individuality will become even more characteristic of the postRomantic generations than the idea that the matter of poetry is the poet him- or
herself. Mid-twentieth-century philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Alexandre
Kojève and the writers they influenced demonstrate how firmly the ideology of deathbased subjectivity has taken hold, the extent to which the conceptualization of the
individual depends on the notion of his or her disappearance (Strauss 1998: 54-73).
But a return to the Romantic period, to the self-designated origin of this absolute
valorization of loss, offers a way to rethink the prehistory and presuppositions of the
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mortal isolation that has passed for intellectual currency during so much of the last
two centuries. The individual, as an absolute, need not find its value and uniqueness
in its fragility. For although the category of irreplaceability necessarily presupposes
that of singularity, the opposite is not true. ‘‘There is no one like you’’ does not mean
quite the same as ‘‘when you are gone, I will not be able to replace you.’’ ‘‘There is no
one like you’’ does not yet contain the notion of loss in it. Separation and difference,
yes, but not necessarily loss. And this singularity can itself become an absolute – as in
Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the absolute difference between people, or what he calls
the ‘‘ethical relation’’ (Levinas 1969: 102-5). The Romantic belief that individuality
derives from irreplaceability is a conceptual choice that has passed itself off as a
necessity, or, in other words, an ideology. Insofar as it is an ideology that still has not
disappeared, in returning to the Romantics, one finds a way to reconsider the limits
and facticity of our own sense of personhood.
Notes
1 All translations are mine unless otherwise
indicated.
2 Marius-François Guyard, for example, writes:
‘‘nothing is more false than to see in 1820 the
beginning date of the Romantic revolution in
poetry. But if the Méditations in no way caused an
upheaval, nonetheless, with the most common
words and worn-out figures, Lamartine sounded
inthemanewmusic’’(Lamartine1963:xvii-xviii).
3 Nerval uses the expression ‘‘lettre mobile’’
(e.g., 1984-93: 48).
4 See, for instance, Kristeva’s analysis of the
chora (Kristeva 1984: 25-30) and her analysis
of poetic ‘‘incarnation’’ in Nerval’s ‘‘El Desdichado’’ (Kristeva 1989: 139-72).
5 As the narrator’s uncle remarks in ‘‘Sylvie,’’
‘‘actresses [are] not women, nature having forgotten to endow them with hearts’’ (Nerval
1999: 146).
6 For a critical history of scholarship on this
poem, see Strauss (1998: 155-205).
References and Further Reading
Aulagnier, Piera (1975). La Violence de l’interprétation: Du pictogramme à l’énoncé. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Bénichou, Paul (1992). L’École du désenchantement:
Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier.
Paris: Gallimard.
Bénichou, Paul (1988). Les Mages romantiques.
Paris: Gallimard.
Brosman, Catharine Savage (2002). ‘‘French Literature.’’ In Dale W. Jacobs (ed.), The World
Book Encyclopedia, vol. VII. Chicago: World
Book Inc., pp. 518-24.
Edwards, Paul (1978). ‘‘Existentialism and Death:
A Survey of Some Confusions and Absurdities.’’
In John Donnelly (ed.), Language, Metaphysics,
and Death. New York: Fordham University
Press, pp. 32-61.
Gautier, Théophile (1907). A History of Romanticism. In The Works of Théophile Gautier, vol. 16,
trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, pp. 3-230.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Aesthetics: Lectures in Fine
Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New
York: Harper & Row.
Johnson, Barbara (1989). ‘‘The Lady in the Lake.’’
In Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French
Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, p. 628, pp. 627-32.
The Poetry of Loss
Kristeva, Julia (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, Julia (1989). ‘‘Nerval, the Disinherited
Poet.’’ In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia,
trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 139-72.
Kselman, Thomas A. (1993). Death and the Afterlife in Modern France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (1977). ‘‘The Signification of the
Phallus.’’ In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 280-91.
Lamartine, Alphonse de (1963). Œuvres poétiques,
ed. Marius-François Guyard. Paris: Gallimard
Pléiade.
Lamartine, Alphonse de (1968). Méditations, ed.
Fernand Letessier. Paris: Garnier Frères.
Lestringant, Frank (1999). Alfred de Musset. Paris:
Flammarion.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1969). Totality and Infinity,
trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
207
Musset, Alfred de (1957). Poésies complètes, ed.
Maurice Allem. Paris: Gallimard Pléiade.
Nerval, Gerard de (1984-93). Œuvres complètes, ed.
Jean Guillaume et al., 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard
Pléiade.
Nerval, Gerard de (1999). Selected Writings, trans.
Richard Sieburth. London: Penguin.
Newmark, Kevin (1988). ‘‘The Forgotten Figures
of Symbolism: Nerval’s Sylvie.’’ Yale French Studies, 74: 207-29.
Rimbaud, Arthur (1972). Œuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard Pléiade.
Strauss, Jonathan (1988). Subjects of Terror: Nerval,
Hegel, and the Modem Self. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Tosca, Maurice (1969). Lamartine ou l’amour de la
vie. Paris: Albin Michel.
Viallaneix, Paul (ed.) (1971). Lamartine: Le Livre
du Centenaire. Paris: Flammarion.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge.
12
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
Hugo’s Poetic Development
Like most writers, Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-85) took some time to find a distinctive
voice. The poems published in Le Conservateur littéraire (The Literary Conservative, the
magazine that he and his brothers edited from 1819 to 1821) and in his first book
Odes et poésies diverses (Odes and Other Poems, 1822) stood as close to eighteenthcentury models as did the early works of Blake or Wordsworth. There were odes in the
manner of ‘‘the great Rousseau’’ (not Jean-Jacques the philosopher, but Jean-Baptiste
the poet, who was then esteemed as the supreme master of the genre), epigrams in the
manner of Voltaire, essays and satires in rhymed couplets. The political and religious
beliefs expressed in them were rigidly traditionalistic; their diction, too, consisted
largely of stock phrases handed down from the previous century. Line after line was
framed with pre-Revolutionary symmetry and balance: ‘‘The forest’s first song and the
day’s first fires’’; ‘‘And the same birds will sing to the same breaking day’’ (‘‘Le Matin’’
[Morning], Odes et ballades V.viii, ll. 5, 9).1
Yet already there were symptoms of unrest. Alongside the poems in Le Conservateur
littéraire were essays; and the young Hugo’s essays commended some decidedly
untraditional writings: the poems of André Chénier (first published in 1819), the
novels of Walter Scott, the first volumes by Lamartine and Desbordes-Valmore.
Voltaire, by comparison, was praised only with severe reservations. The epigraphs
in Odes et poésies diverses reflected analogous likes and dislikes. They were drawn from
Chénier, Schiller (as translated by Madame de Staël), Chateaubriand, Vigny, the
Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Charles Nodier of the macabre
tale Smarra, as well as from sources admired by conservatives and innovators alike,
such as the Scriptures and Virgil – but not from the pillars of French Classicism, such
as Voltaire and Racine.
Today Hugo’s early Odes may seem relatively conventional, but their first readers
were struck – indeed disconcerted – by the extent to which they departed from
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
209
tradition. The young poet was rebuked for varying the rhythm and rhyme-scheme
from stanza to stanza (‘‘Les Vierges de Verdun,’’ written in 1818), for ‘‘sacrificing
grammatical propriety to poetic expressiveness’’ (‘‘Le Rétablissement de la statue de
Henri IV,’’ 1819), for using ‘‘low’’ terms and failing to maintain properly elevated
diction (‘‘Moı̈se sur le Nil,’’ 1820), for writing in a deliberately obscure, ‘‘apocalyptic’’
style (‘‘L’Âme,’’ 1823; ‘‘I could make out nothing from it, except that the author is a
lunatic,’’ complained Edmond Géraud in May 1824). (See Leuilliot 1985: 1051-8 for
further details.) All these audacities remained characteristic of Hugo’s work in his
maturity. In ‘‘Booz endormi’’ (Boaz Asleep, 1857), for instance, the rhyme-scheme
changes in the two stanzas where the narrative takes a dramatic step forward and the
mood deepens (ll. 37-40 and 57-60); the style encompasses the conversational (‘‘He’d
worked hard on his threshing floor all day,’’ l. 2) as well as the literary (‘‘The gloom
was nuptial, solemn, conquering,’’ l. 67); the whole scene is surrounded and invested
with deliberate intangibilities, the most celebrated being the mysterious ‘‘Jérimadeth’’ of line 81. There is scarcely any poetic strategy of Hugo’s later years that cannot
be paralleled somewhere in the volume of 1822.2
Yet if it is important to note the continuity between his early and his mature work,
it is important to recognize the development too. During the 1820s his political,
literary, and religious thought underwent profound changes. By the middle of the
century, the former royalist had become a committed opponent of all monarchies; the
former Roman Catholic had come to regard the God incarnate in Jesus Christ as
incompatible with any human religion; and the former editor of Le Conservateur
littéraire had become the acknowledged leader of French Romanticism (a label that
he himself viewed with characteristic ambivalence).
Hugo was well aware that these three transformations were interrelated. He came
to believe that the literary practices of any society are inseparable from its political
and religious views. The French poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had
lived in an orderly, stable absolute monarchy – the France of Louis XIV and Louis
XV – and their writings had inevitably reflected the society that had shaped them.
Such a society would instinctively shun any verbal threat to the established order –
any term that might draw too much attention to unpleasant matters, or that might be
too closely associated with the underprivileged. So the poets of Louis XIV’s reign, and
their successors in the following century, confined their vocabulary to words and
phrases that were noble, harmonious, and nonthreatening. Anything disreputable or
shocking simply could not be said – at least by any person of good breeding.
Till 1789,
The language was the State: words, well or ill born,
Lived in castes, with their own compartments – some,
The noble ones, kept company with Jocastas,
Phèdres, Meropes, and decorum ruled them;
They rode to Versailles in the king’s own carriages;
The rest, beggarly rabble, hangdog rascals,
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
Kept to the provinces: some chained in hulks
Of slang, fond of the lowest kinds of company,
Torn to rags in the marketplace, no wigs,
No stockings; born for prose or farce; stylistic riffraff in the scattered dark; clowns, rustics,
Clodhoppers whom Boss Vaugelas had branded
‘‘Vulg’’ in the convict Dictionary – expressing
Abject colloquial life, no more: degraded,
Base, sullied, bourgeois.3 (‘‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation’’ [Reply to a Bill of
Indictment], Les Contemplations I.vii, ll. 40-54)
In the same poem, Hugo proceeds to show how the literary rules of pre-Revolutionary
French society prevented any effective criticism of that society. Were there whores on
the streets? Were there pigs in power? The language of French Classicism did not
allow you to say so, because such words as ‘‘pig’’ (cochon) and ‘‘whore’’ (catin) were not
permitted; the language of French Classicism allowed you to utter your complaint
only in terms so mild and roundabout that it was robbed of all its bite.
Hugo argued that he himself belonged to a new, post-Revolutionary era. He could
not be confined by the old rules, because he wished to say things that the old rules had
forbidden. If you believe in freeing the people, then you must allow them to speak
freely. A democratic attitude to the community demands a democratic attitude to its
language.
I dressed the old dictionary in liberty’s colors:
Away with peasant words and senator words! . . .
. . . ‘‘There’s no word,’’
I said, ‘‘where a pure-winged idea can’t perch
After flying the azure blue.’’ Disgusting!
Litotes and syllepsis and hypallage
Shuddered. I stood on boundary-stone Aristotle
And declared all words free, adult, and equal. . . .
I had the cow and heifer fraternizing,
One being Betsy, and one Bérénice.4
The ode got drunk then, and kissed Rabelais;
The Marseillaise was sung on Mount Parnassus;
And the nine Muses tangoed with their breasts bare. (‘‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation,’’
ll. 66-7, 71-5, 85-9)
Fundamentally Hugo does not inhabit the same world as the pre-Revolutionary
writers. Their universe was tidy, decorous, symmetrical; his is irregular, erratic,
unbounded. And his poetry must inevitably express what he sees, not what his
predecessors saw.
God – I’ve said it before – is wide open to criticism.
He knows no restraint. He’s wild, unseemly, extravagant:
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
211
There giant, here dwarf,
Everything all at the same time; enormous; he doesn’t leave out things.
He overdoes chasms and prisms. . . .
How the Academy5 would tell him a thing or two!
What is the point of the comet? What is the use of the bolide?
To a sturdy, reliable pedant,
Well, the more one is dazzled, the less one is satisfied;
Polonius’s saws and Ockham’s razors
Suffer God only with some impatience.
God disturbs law and order, works science to death;
As soon as you finish, you have to start it again;
You seem to feel some kind of serpent all scaly with sunrise
Slipping away through your fingers.
Just when you’ve said ‘‘Enough!’’ he says ‘‘In addition!’’ (‘‘Encore Dieu, mais avec des
restrictions’’ [More About God, But With Some Reservations], L’Art d’être grand-père
IV.v, ll. 29-33, 40-50)
This view of the universe shapes Hugo’s poetry at all levels. Like the Creator he
describes, he ‘‘disturbs law and order.’’ He will not submit to the authority of an
Academy, any more than he will submit to the authority of a monarchy. He runs
phrases across lines in ways that French critical theory had traditionally forbidden
(Rochette 1911: 223-76): ‘‘Litotes and syllepsis and hypallage / Shuddered’’; ‘‘some
chained in hulks / Of slang.’’ He uses words and images from aspects of human society
that were traditionally regarded as beyond the bounds of poetry, from the most
technical (‘‘syllepsis,’’ ‘‘bolide’’) to the most colloquial (‘‘works . . . to death’’). In
matters of overall architecture he is equally unorthodox. His epics, La Légende des
siècles (The Legend of the Ages, 1859-83) and La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan,
1886), are irregular and fragmented in design; his dramatic poems, from Cromwell
(1827) to Le Pape (The Pope, 1878) and Torquemada (1882), are constructed in
defiance of the traditional unities.
Not that Hugo denies the existence of ‘‘order’’ in the universe. But he believes that
it is not the kind of order depicted by his Classicist predecessors. In the 1826 Preface
to Odes et ballades he writes:
Compare the royal garden at Versailles, beautifully leveled, beautifully trimmed,
beautifully kempt, beautifully raked, beautifully sanded; filled everywhere with little
cascades, little pools, little groves, bronze tritons frolicking ceremoniously on oceans
pumped at great expense from the River Seine, marble fauns courting dryads allegorically enclosed in hosts of conical yews, cylindrical laurels, spherical orange trees,
elliptical myrtles, and other trees whose normal shape, being no doubt too trivial, has
been politely corrected by the gardener’s knife – compare that much-admired garden to
a primeval forest in the New World, with its gigantic trees, its tall grasses, its dense
vegetation, its myriad birds of myriad hues, its broad avenues where darkness and light
merely play across the greenery, its savage harmonies, its huge rivers sweeping away
islands of flowers, its immense cataracts swaying rainbows! I don’t ask which garden has
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
magnificence, grandeur, beauty, but simply: Which one possesses order, and which one
possesses disorder? In the first, waters in captivity or diverted from their course,
springing up only to stagnate; gods made of stone; trees transported from their native
soil, ripped from their climate, robbed even of their shape, their fruits, and forced to
suffer the grotesque whims of cord and pruning knife; everywhere, in short, the natural
order contraverted, inverted, overthrown, destroyed. In the second, by contrast, everything obeys an invariable law; a God seems alive in everything. The drops of water
follow their inclination and form rivers, which form seas; the seeds choose their soil and
produce a forest. Each plant, each shrub, each tree is born in its due season, grows in its
own place, yields its own fruit, dies at its due time. Even thorns have beauty there. We
ask again: Which one possesses order? Choose between a masterpiece of gardening and
the handiwork of nature, between what is beautiful by convention and what is beautiful
without the rules, between an artificial literature and an original poetry!
In fact, he maintains that ‘‘we mustn’t confuse order with regularity. Regularity is
only a matter of external form; order arises from the very depths of something, from
the intelligent deployment of the fundamental elements of a subject. Regularity is a
purely human, material arrangement; order is, so to speak, divine.’’ His favorite
philosopher is Kant, not Descartes.
Hugo’s poetry – and prose – naturally reflect his conception of the universe. As may
be seen from the above examples, they are not totally lacking in order; they are highly
ordered, but their order is ‘‘wild, unseemly, extravagant,’’ and refuses to be limited by
standard human rules. He does not abandon rhyme altogether, for instance; but his use
of it is both less orderly and more orderly than the pre-Revolutionary poets’. As we have
already observed, he is not afraid to vary the rhyme-scheme from stanza to stanza.
Moreover, he sets himself no unbreakable laws about the types of rhyme that may and
may not be employed. He is not afraid of the cheapest, most plebeian rhymes; yeux
(eyes) and cieux (skies), nuit (night) and luit (bright) occur again and again in his verse.
When questioned about this, he declared in a letter of November 8, 1855 to Noël
Parfait: ‘‘There are some words that exist like God in the depths of the language.’’ Yet at
the other end of the spectrum, he also employs much more complex rhymes than the
Classicist poets had done. He delights in elaborate multisyllabic rimes riches.
Hélas! on ne peut être en même temps poëte
Qui s’envole et tribun coudoyant Changarnier,
Aigle dans l’idéal et vautour au charnier. (‘‘Post-scriptum’’ [Postscript], Toute la lyre V.ii,
ll. 9-11)
(How can you be both poet in full flight
And tribune swallowing what some Nosy Parker says,
Eagle in the ideal and vulture among carcasses?)
Est-ce le vent de l’ombre obscure?
Ce vent qui sur Jésus passa!
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
213
Est-ce le grand Rien d’Épicure,
Ou le grand Tout de Spinosa? (‘‘Pendant une maladie’’ [During an Illness], Les Chansons des
rues et des bois II.IV.ii, ll. 16-20)
(Is it a wind that Jesus knows – a
Gale from the shadows that obscure us?
The great Nothing of Epicurus,
Or else the great All of Spinoza?)
He devises intricate stanza-forms that would have seemed lacking in decorum to his
predecessors. The arrival and departure of a flight of evil spirits is narrated in lines that
gradually increase from two syllables to 12 in length, and then decrease just as gradually
back to two (‘‘Les Djinns’’ [The Djinns], Les Orientales XXVIII). A girl swaying in a
hammock is presented in verses that playfully enact the motion they describe:
Zara, lovely lazy thing,
Starts to swing
While her hammock’s cords support her
Just above a fountain-spring
Billowing
Full of the Illysus’ water. (‘‘Sara la baigneuse’’ [Zara Bathing], Les Orientales XIX, ll. 1-6.)
There are even rhyme-schemes within rhyme-schemes: in one celebrated passage
Hugo embeds 15 three-syllable rhymed lines within four 12-syllable lines, which
also rhyme (‘‘Esca,’’ Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit II.I.i, ll. 271-4).
The same concept of order may be seen at work on a larger scale in the overall
architecture of his poetry collections. In some respects his volumes are more highly
organized than his predecessors’; in other respects they are less organized, for their
order is that of the Amazonian jungle, not the Versailles garden; it is ‘‘wild, unseemly,
extravagant, . . . enormous.’’ He seeks to be all-embracing, not homogeneous. The
1822 volume of Odes et poésies diverses began with a manifesto on the poet’s role in
contemporary society, ‘‘Le Poëte dans les révolutions’’ (The Poet in Revolutionary
Times), followed by nine odes on recent French political history; then a second
manifesto, ‘‘La Lyre et la harpe’’ (The Lyre and the Harp), introduced odes on reflective
and metaphysical themes: six on impersonal, remote subjects, followed by six very
personal poems addressed to the poet’s beloved and a final, equally personal gaze
beyond life into eternity, ‘‘Le Matin’’ (Morning). The writer’s broad range of interests,
and his penchant for arranging his poems into even larger poem-cycles, were already
apparent. (By comparison, the most conspicuously innovative collection of the previous decade, Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques, had been relatively conservative in
design: its contents were fairly homogeneous – nearly all of them were, as the
book’s title announced, meditations – and there was no attempt to make large-scale
patterns out of its component poems.) But Hugo’s 1822 volume was only the
beginning. It eventually grew into an even more intricately structured mass of 72
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
odes and 15 ballads, with the title Odes et ballades (Odes and Ballads, 1828). A poem
originally written for the Odes, ‘‘La Ville prise’’ (The Captured City), soon seeded a
new collection, Les Orientales (Orientalia, 1829), a series of exercises on Eastern (mainly
Greek and Turkish) themes: this too illustrated the Hugolian desire to encompass
within a coherent, though not ‘‘regular,’’ overall structure (Grant 1979) as diverse a
range of material as possible: thus the carefree voyeurist piece already cited, ‘‘Sara la
baigneuse’’ (Zara Bathing), was immediately preceded by an urgent political statement, ‘‘L’Enfant’’ (The Child), and immediately followed by a passionate song of
probably lost love and presumably hopeless hope:
Monte, écureuil, monte au grand chêne,
Sur la branche des cieux prochaine,
Qui plie et tremble comme un jonc.
Cigogne, aux vieilles tours fidèle,
Oh! vole et monte à tire-d’aile
De l’église à la citadelle,
Du haut clocher au grand donjon.
Vieux aigle, monte de ton aire
A la montagne centenaire
Que blanchit l’hiver éternel.
Et toi qu’en ta couche inquiète
Jamais l’aube ne vit muette,
Monte, monte, vive alouette,
Vive alouette, monte au ciel!
Et maintenant, du haut de l’arbre,
Des flèches de la tour de marbre,
Du grand mont, du ciel enflammé,
A l’horizon, parmi la brume,
Voyez-vous flotter une plume,
Et courir un cheval qui fume,
Et revenir mon bien-aimé? (‘‘Attente’’ [Anticipation], Les Orientales XX)
(Rise, squirrel, up the great oak, rise,
Climb the branch nearest to the skies,
Which bends and buckles like a reed.
Stork, ancient towers’ sentinel,
Fly up from spire and parish bell
To mighty keep and citadel –
Wing your way with the utmost speed!
Old eagle, from your aerie home
Soar to the age-old mountain-dome
Whitened with everlasting snow.
Lark that, in your unquiet nest,
No sunrise ever saw at rest,
Go up, go, zestful lark, go, zestful lark, go up to heaven, go!
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
215
And tell me now, from the tree’s height,
From the stone tower’s topmost flight,
From bright sky and high bivouac,
On the horizon, through the haze,
O can you see a plume that sways,
A galloping horse that steams and sprays,
And my beloved coming back?)
The Orientalia sprang from the impersonal side of the Odes: its speakers were captive
Greek girls, Turkish military leaders, superstitious Arab peasants, politically tactless
European gentry seeing the local sights – figures far removed from Victor-Marie
Hugo himself. The more personal, intimate side of the Odes gave rise to the tetralogy
that followed: Les Feuilles d’automne (Autumn Leaves, 1831), Les Chants du crépuscule
(Songs of the Half-Light, 1835), Les Voix intérieures (Inner Voices, 1837), and Les
Rayons et les ombres (Sunlight and Shadows, 1840). Here the speakers were closely akin
to Hugo the man. In ‘‘Ce siècle avait deux ans . . . ’’ (This century was two years
old . . . ) a recent convert to democracy and political liberalism took stock of his
heritage; in the central lyrics of the 1835 volume a lover courted his new beloved,
while in the later ‘‘Tristesse d’Olympio’’ (The Melancholy of Olympio) he mourned
the passage of time and the passing of romance; in ‘‘Sur le bal de l’Hôtel de Ville’’ (A
Ball at the Hôtel de Ville) a social reformer attacked the oppression of one class and
one sex by another; in ‘‘Regardez: les enfants se sont assis en rond . . . ’’ (Look at the
children next to one another . . . ) a family man contemplated his wife and children; in
‘‘Après une lecture de Dante’’ (After Reading Dante) a controversial poet drew
strength from the example of a predecessor. Even when the author was speaking
through a fictional persona and discussing the most general of issues, his own personal
voice could still be distinctly heard:
La vie, ô gentilhomme, est une comédie
Étrange, folle, gaie, effroyable, hardie,
Taillée au vieux patron des pièces du vieux temps,
Avec des spadassins, avec des capitans.
La morale en est sombre et cependant fort saine.
Tout s’y tient. La vertu, dès la première scène,
Tombe dans une trappe, et la richesse en sort;
Chacun pousse son cri pour se plaindre du sort,
Le savant brait, le roi rugit, le manant beugle;
Le mariage est borgne et l’amour est aveugle,
La justice est boiteuse et l’honneur est manchot;
L’enfer, dont on voit luire en un coin le réchaud
Qui jette au front du riche un reflet écarlate,
De toutes les vertus a fait des culs-de-jatte;
Le bravo quête un duel, l’amoureux un duo;
L’eunuque – c’est l’envie – enrage, crie: ‘‘Ah! oh!’’
Et jette à tout sultan des regards effroyables;
Toutes les passions, qui sont autant de diables,
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
Ont leur rôle, tantôt dolent, tantôt pompeux.
C’est beau! Figure-toi la pièce, si tu peux;
Elle a le cœur humain pour scène, et pour parterre
Elle a le genre humain.
A la fin du mystère,
Le rideau tombe. On siffle. – Absurde! tout est mal!
On demande l’auteur et l’acteur principal.
Le riche veut ravoir son argent. Cris, tapage.
– L’auteur! l’auteur! nommez l’auteur! à bas l’ouvrage! –
Alors, apparaissant devant la rampe en feu,
Satan fait trois saluts, et dit: ‘‘L’auteur, c’est Dieu.’’ (‘‘La vie, ô gentilhomme, est une
comédie . . . ’’ [Life, dear sir, is a comedy. . . ], Dernière Gerbe, MS 79/121)6
(Life, dear sir, is a comedy – wild, daring,
Witty, extravagant, and overbearing,
Done in the style of old-time melodrama,
With thugs in capes and officers in armor.
The moral is severe, but strong and clean.
It’s all coherent. In the opening scene
Virtue falls down the trap, and Wealth comes out.
Scholars bleat, peasants moo, and monarchs shout;
Everyone wails and thinks his fate unkind.
Matrimony is one-eyed, Love is blind,
Honor has lost its right arm, Justice limps.
In one corner Hell’s gas stove gives a glimpse
Of the rich fellow lit with scarlet ripples.
It turns all of the virtues into cripples.
Bullies seek duels, lovers seek duets;
The eunuch (who is Envy) howls and frets
And gives every last sultan nasty looks.
All of the passions – all of them are crooks –
Play their parts, whining or Olympian.
It’s great! Imagine the play if you can:
Onstage the human heart, and in the pit
The human race.
Then, at the end of it,
The curtain falls. Boos. ‘‘Lousy, every bit!’’
Calls for the author and the leading man.
The rich chap wants his money back. Howls, jeers.
‘‘Down with the work! Who wrote it? Name the clod!’’ –
At the footlights, in fire, Satan appears.
He bows three times and says: ‘‘The author’s God.’’)
A comprehensive survey of Hugo’s later poetic achievements would lead us far beyond
the scope of a Companion to European Romanticism. Already in the preface to Les Rayons et
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
217
les ombres he had suggested that his work was deepening: ‘‘in this volume . . . the horizon
has perhaps broadened, the sky become more azure, the tranquility more profound.’’
Many later readers have had the same impression, and have felt that the poetry
collections of the following decade went still further. Les Châtiments (The Empire in
the Pillory, 1853) was a 7,000-line collection of political satires, Les Contemplations
(1856) an 11,000-line collection of personal and metaphysical lyrics and meditations.
During the same period he began work on his major epic trilogy, much of which
remained unpublished for several decades: La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages,
1859-83), La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), and Dieu (God, 1891). Perhaps the
most original of his subsequent projects were the two that superficially appeared most
frivolous: a cycle of playful quatrain-poems on the age-old theme of profane and sacred
love, Les Chansons des rues et des bois (Songs of Street and Wood, 1865), and a suitably
light, though not lightweight, collection devoted to his grandchildren, L’Art d’être
grand-père (The Art of Being a Grandfather, 1877). As a pendant to his epic trilogy he
issued a tetralogy of long philosophical poems, Le Pape (The Pope, 1878), La Pitié
suprème (The Supreme Compassion, 1879), Religions et religion (Religions and Religion,
1880), and L’Âne (The Donkey, 1880). He also worked on two further collections of
political poetry: a never-completed sequel to Les Châtiments, much of which was
eventually issued as Les Années funestes (The Fateful Years, 1898), and a kind of verse
diary dealing with the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, L’Année terrible (The Year
of Horrors, 1872). Alongside these volumes devoted to single topics – descendants, in
some respects, of the Orientalia – he planned two or three collections as variegated as the
Odes and Ballads; only one of them, Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit (The Four Winds of the
Spirit, 1881), was completed, but after his death his literary executors gathered most of
his miscellaneous unpublished verse into volumes of similar type, which they entitled
Toute la lyre (The Whole Lyre, 1888-97) and Dernière Gerbe (Last Gleanings, 1902).
Hugo’s poetry has always elicited exceptionally diverse responses; there is far less
agreement about the nature and extent of his literary achievement than there is about
(say) Wordsworth’s or Goethe’s or Pushkin’s. The disagreement has existed as long as
the poems have been read. As early as the mid-1820s the author of the earliest Odes was
hailed as a ‘‘genius’’ in some quarters, dismissed as a ‘‘lunatic’’ in others. Today there is
still no sign that the conflict is being resolved, or that a general consensus is emerging.
One recent author describes Hugo, without qualification or reservation, as ‘‘France’s
greatest writer’’; another calls him ‘‘a monstrous aberration in literary history.’’ This
division of opinion is, of course, due to the very nature of the poems themselves. They
were written to provoke – to ‘‘disturb law and order’’ – and they do provoke. Thus it is
more than usually difficult to summarize the varying critical attitudes to his work.
Responses to Hugo’s Poetry
Nevertheless, three broad phases of Hugo criticism may perhaps be distinguished.
During most of his lifetime, and for several decades afterwards, Hugo was the most
218
E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
widely read poet in France – and possibly in the world. (His funeral, in 1885, attracted
far larger crowds than the obsequies of any other mere writer have ever done.) No
doubt some of his readers were aware only of his prose works, and others only of his
verse; but many, at least in France, had some knowledge of both. His successive
publications might be revered, or they might be vilified, but they could not be
ignored. Everyone with any interest in contemporary literature had to take note of
them. Consequently he exerted a vital influence on several generations of his fellow
writers, especially in France itself. Often the influence flowed in both directions: the
very colleague who drew inspiration from Hugo also provided inspiration for him.
Both in points of detail and in its overall architecture, Lamartine’s 1832 masterpiece,
Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, showed that its author had been reading Hugo’s 18224 Odes – which in turn had owed much to Lamartine’s 1820 Méditations poétiques.
A generation later, in 1859, Baudelaire wrote a series of poems deeply influenced by
Hugo’s Contemplations and Légende des siècles (as the younger poet himself acknowledged
in a letter to Poulet-Malassis on October 1, 1859) – while those Hugo volumes had
themselves been influenced by the Baudelaire poems eventually collected in 1857 as
Les Fleurs du mal (Hugo’s ‘‘Cerigo,’’ Les Contemplations V.xx, is plainly a response to
Baudelaire’s ‘‘Un Voyage à Cythère’’). Later still, Hugo’s Chansons des rues et des bois and
some of the Contemplations (particularly ‘‘La Fête chez Thérèse’’ (Thérèse’s Party, I.xxii))
provided Verlaine with ideas for his Fêtes galantes (1869) – while Hugo’s love for the
jaunty tone and adventurous versification of that little volume may be seen in some
parts of his own Art d’être grand-père, such as ‘‘Fenêtres ouvertes’’ (Open Windows, I.xi).
In those days, therefore, Hugo’s verse was not merely an object of study but a living
stimulus. The stimulus was not limited to France, nor did it affect only poets. Tolstoy,
who seems to have admired Hugo more than any other writer of his century, went to
the extent of translating sections of La Légende des siècles into Russian prose.
A generation after Hugo’s death, there was a reaction against his poetry. This is not
an unusual phenomenon: many artists (we might think of Shakespeare and Bach, of
Monteverdi and Rembrandt) go through a phase of posthumous neglect before the
world regains interest in their work. Few of the most respected twentieth-century
writers showed any significant trace of Hugo’s influence; few of the leading twentiethcentury critics devoted much attention to his verse. Stray lines and phrases had found
their way into popular idiom and could be cited half-mockingly in appropriate
situations, as they were, for instance, in Marcel Pagnol’s Topaze (1928), Jean Renoir’s
La Règle du jeu (1939), and Max Ophuls’s Madame de . . . (1953). But their author was
no longer a living stimulus. As with his near-contemporaries Dickens and Verdi, his
very popularity was held against him: he was a ‘‘great entertainer’’ rather than a
‘‘creative artist.’’7
In left-wing or radical literary circles there was a partial exception to such views.
Hugo’s own literary experimentalism and political radicalism appealed to many
Dadaist, Surrealist, Marxist, and Anarchist writers, who regarded him with more
respect than their more conservative colleagues did. The beginnings of this trend
could already be seen during the final decades of the nineteenth century: Rimbaud
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
219
and Mallarmé, for instance, admired Hugo more unreservedly, and were more profoundly influenced by his work, than the relatively traditionalist post-1880 Verlaine
and Leconte de Lisle. Later radical admirers in France included André Breton, Louis
Aragon, and Paul Éluard. In Soviet Russia, partly as a legacy of Tolstoy’s enthusiasm,
Hugo remained an acknowledged classic. Perhaps the best introduction to such views
is Aragon’s Avez-vous lu Hugo? (1952), part critical essay, part anthology, which went
through many reprints in spite of its comparatively marginal, nonmainstream circulation.
During the last few decades, Hugo’s critical fortunes have paralleled those of other
major nineteenth-century artists; again Dickens and Verdi may offer particularly close
analogies. He is no longer read by mass audiences, and he exerts no significant
influence on contemporary artists; nevertheless, an interest in his work is no longer
a sign of bad taste, and in certain circles it has even become a mark of fashion: a
character in a ‘‘new wave’’ film (Eric Rohmer’s 1992 Conte d’hiver) may quote an
extended passage from one of Hugo’s later philosophical poems and seriously discuss
the ideas contained in it, as a character in a film with comparable intellectual
pretensions a generation earlier might have discussed a passage of Rimbaud or
Donne. At a different level, Hugo’s work has become a legitimate object of scholarly
study, as seen in the production of major editions (Massin’s 1967-71 chronological
Œuvres complètes; Journet’s and Robert’s numerous studies of the manuscripts) and
major critical monographs (Albouy 1963, Gaudon 1969).
The aspects of the poetry that attract most attention at present are not necessarily
those that appealed to readers in Hugo’s own day. Here Tennyson’s 1877 sonnet ‘‘To
Victor Hugo’’ may provide a convenient reference point. Tennyson, like most of his
contemporaries, judged Hugo to be the greatest living poet of Europe (‘‘Beyond our
strait,’’ l.6),8 and his sonnet contains four phrases that may apply primarily to Hugo
the poet –
Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears,
French of the French, and Lord of human tears;
Child-lover . . . (‘‘To Victor Hugo,’’ ll. 2-4)
– yet three of those four phrases would probably not satisfy the majority of presentday Hugolian scholars.
Tennyson characterizes the author of L’Art d’être grand-père as ‘‘Child-lover.’’ That
volume is still greatly admired, but recent accounts of it tend to stress not so much
the poet’s affection for children as his concern with adult political and religious issues
(see Millet 1985: 1446-7, who goes so far as to say that the book ‘‘is above all a
polemic for political clemency,’’ and Ubersfeld 1985: 167-84). We might point, in
partial support, to the book’s own words: when he listens to the conversation of
children, says Hugo, ‘‘I find a deep and impressive meaning within it, / Sometimes a
severe one.’’ The child, in these poems, is partly a slave oppressed by the tyranny of
those in control, partly a willing accomplice in that oppression (‘‘Children, like
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
adults, want to be beasts of burden’’), partly a means of escape from the oppression,
partly a fresh eye looking at the world without conventional preconceptions, and
partly a future tyrant in embryo (‘‘Encore l’Immaculée Conception’’ [The Immaculate
Conception Revisited], L’Art d’être grand-père XV.vii, ll. 12-13, 34). ‘‘A slave would be
a tyrant if he could,’’ Hugo wrote in ‘‘La Ville disparue’’ (The Vanished City, La
Légende des siècles V, l. 30) at the time when he was working on the Grand-père poems.
Tennyson also speaks of Hugo the ‘‘Lord of human tears.’’ The funereal elegies in
Book IV of the Contemplations touched the hearts of so many nineteenth-century
readers that Hugo’s publisher brought out a special selection of them for the
consolation of bereaved mothers. Today those poems continue to speak most strongly
to readers who have suffered similar experiences – but such readers are much rarer
nowadays, in a culture where comparatively few of our friends and relatives die
prematurely. Here many of us must feel that we are gazing dimly back into an
alien era when millions could weep inexplicably at the death of Little Nell, and
when the queen of England could declare, ‘‘Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my
comfort.’’ Even for some of Hugo’s most sympathetic critics, the effort of imaginative
identification that is required may be simply too great, prompting complaints that a
poem like ‘‘A Villequier’’ (At Villequier, Les Contemplations IV.xv) is ‘‘theatrical’’ and
‘‘did a good deal to give Romanticism a bad name for indulgence in the wrong kind of
sentiment’’ (Ireson 1997: 165). Les Contemplations is still one of Hugo’s most admired
collections, but today’s readers tend to find its greatness mainly in the reflective and
metaphysical poems, or in the structure of the work as a whole (Nash 1976, Frey
1988), and not in the products of ‘‘human tears.’’
Beside ‘‘Child-lover’’ and ‘‘Lord of human tears’’ Tennyson places ‘‘French of the
French’’ – a phrase so unspecific that its reference is not immediately apparent. Here,
perhaps, we may be seeing a characteristically English and Victorian stance, an
attempt to make Hugo’s political position more universally acceptable by dissociating
it from its distinctive partisan substance (redistribution of wealth, abolition of capital
punishment, republican government, etc.) and reducing it to simple patriotism.
(Tennyson would of course be thinking mainly about the verse, in Les Châtiments
and perhaps L’Année terrible; little of Hugo’s political prose was then in print, apart
from his speeches, which were not usually regarded as literature.) Nineteenth-century
admirers in other countries (Tolstoy, for instance) were more inclined to maintain that
the character and quality of Hugo’s work were inseparable from the character and
quality of the vision that generated it. If he had been a traditionalist in politics and
religion, then, whether for good or ill, his poetry would have been more traditional
too; if he had been an anarchist and an atheist, then he might have been more inclined
to abandon all pattern and design in his writings. Much recent Hugolian scholarship
has followed up these points (which were first made by the poet himself, for instance
in the ‘‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation’’ already cited), noting how his writings were
partly shaped by the social and political preoccupations of his culture, and partly
acted as a criticism of them (Butor 1964: 199-214).
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
221
Characteristically Victorian, too, is Tennyson’s failure to mention the love poems.
Hugo’s English contemporaries could not forget that his copious verses on that
subject had been addressed largely (and over a period of 30 years, from the 1835
Chants du crépuscule to the 1865 Chansons des rues et des bois) to a woman other than his
wife. In other countries the love poems were often seen as the very best of his work;
indeed, François Coppée famously called him ‘‘the greatest lyric poet of all ages.’’
Even the severest critics often qualified their disparagement by observing that he
could write very pretty love lyrics when he laid aside his more grandiose ambitions
(Marzials 1888: 223). Similarly, when nineteenth-century composers wished to
display their literary taste and their familiarity with contemporary verse by setting
one of Hugo’s poems to music, the work they chose was almost always a love poem.
Poems of other kinds – even when they were written in the stanzaic forms best suited
to nineteenth-century music, and even when Hugo had deliberately designed them to
be sung (as with some of the Châtiments) – rarely attracted composers, whereas
relatively insubstantial pieces of the ‘‘I love you’’ kind were set again and again. In
this area, as in the children’s poems, current taste tends to notice and prize darker
undertones and deeper resonances; uncomplicated love lyrics attract less study than
pieces in which love is held in tension against other emotions (Albouy 1964:
1411-13).
Yet Tennyson’s other description of Hugo the poet – ‘‘Cloud-weaver of prodigious
hopes and fears’’ – reminds us that he was a fellow practitioner with a fellow
practitioner’s special interests and insights, which may have led him to appreciate
aspects of these poems that most of his contemporaries were unable to fathom. Like
Baudelaire,9 he seems to have taken special note of the so-called ‘‘visionary’’ stream of
poems running from the early ‘‘La Pente de la rêverie’’ (The Slope of Reverie, Les
Feuilles d’automne XXIX) through ‘‘Puits de l’Inde! tombeaux! . . . ’’ (Indian caverns!
tombs! . . . , Les Rayons et les ombres XIII) and pointing toward masterpieces that still
awaited publication, such as the extraordinary Gavarnie fragment of Dieu, ‘‘Remonte
aux premiers jours de ton globe . . . ’’ (Turn back toward your planet’s earliest days . . . ,
MS 106/6a-12a). Now that almost the whole of Hugo’s poetry is readily available in
print, it is relatively easy for us to appreciate that side of his work. Hugo himself
repeatedly delayed the publication of Dieu because he feared that it would be too
challenging for its readers (‘‘the air in that region is a bit too rarefied for them,’’ he
wrote); yet nowadays it is perhaps more highly regarded than any other single poem
he wrote. John Porter Houston, in his classic introductory survey, called it ‘‘to my
mind Hugo’s most enthralling book’’ (Houston 1988: 151); and the standard Englishlanguage bibliography not only finds ‘‘Hugo’s poetic masterpiece’’ here, but also says
that the work ‘‘contains probably the highest poetry written in French’’ (Grimaud
1994: 212). In the days of Tennyson and Baudelaire, however, the pattern in the
carpet was still invisible to most readers, who tended to spend their time among the
simpler love lyrics and elegies for the dead, unconscious of the strange woven clouds
that the poet would offer from time to time on the very next page.
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E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
Les hommes passeront, la poussière éperdue
Passera, les oiseaux fuiront dans l’étendue,
Les chevaux passeront, les vagues passeront,
Les nuages fuiront et s’évanouiront,
Les chars s’envoleront dans la rumeur des routes;
Mais les obscurités, les questions, les doutes,
Resteront, sans qu’on voie un peu de jour qui point;
Mais les ombres sont là qui ne passeront point;
Mais on aura toujours, quoi qu’on rêve et qu’on fasse,
Devant soi, le prodige et la nuit face à face;
Mais on ne verra rien, jamais, jamais, jamais,
Pas même une blancheur sur de vagues sommets,
Pas même un mouvement de souffles et de bouches,
Dans l’immobilité des ténèbres farouches. (‘‘Les hommes passeront . . . ’’ [People will
pass . . . ], Dieu, MS 106/732.)
(People will pass, dust itself will decay
And pass, horses and waves will pass away,
Birds will fly off into the firmament,
Clouds will be blown away, dispersed, and spent,
Carts will roll by with bustle and congestion –
But mystery, uncertainty, and question
Will remain with no sign of dawn’s first glow;
The shadows will be there and never go;
Always, whatever you may dream or do,
Strangeness and darkness will be facing you;
Never – never at all – will you catch sight
Of one white glimmer on a misty height,
Or of one breath or zephyr taking flight
Within the stillness of rebellious night.)
Notes
1 Poem-numbers in roman numerals conform to
those in the ne varietur edition (Hugo 1880-5
and 1886-1902); manuscript-numbers in
arabic numerals are those by which Hugo’s
papers were catalogued after his death. Translations in the present chapter are cited from
Blackmore (2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2004).
2 The blend of conservatism and experimentalism in Hugo’s early odes has been succinctly
analyzed in Venzac (1955: 584-8).
3 Jocasta, Phèdre, and Merope were the aristocratic heroines of tragedies by Voltaire and
Racine; the grammarian Claude Favre de Vau-
4
5
6
7
gelas (1585-1650) had been influential in ridding French literary style of ‘‘vulgarisms.’’
Bérénice, too, was the aristocratic heroine of a
tragedy by Racine.
The Academy – the Académie française – is
the traditional arbiter of French literary
taste.
Though not published until 1902, the piece
was written 60 years earlier and is characteristic of its author’s style at the time.
This famous (and revealing) formula was
first applied to Dickens in Leavis (1948:
19).
Victor Hugo’s Poetry
8 For obvious reasons, Tennyson would not have
wished to include any living English poet in
the comparison. His sonnet first appeared in
Nineteenth Century (June 1877) and was reprinted, slightly revised, in Ballads and Other
Poems (1880).
223
9 ‘‘Who does not remember ‘La Pente de la
rêverie,’ now already so remote in date?
Many of his recent works seem to have arisen,
no less naturally than prolifically, from the
faculty that presided over the creation of that
enthralling poem,’’ Baudelaire wrote in his
June 1861 essay ‘‘Victor Hugo.’’
References and Further Reading
Albouy, Pierre (1963). La Création mythologique
chez Victor Hugo. Paris: José Corti.
Albouy, Pierre (ed.) (1964). Victor Hugo, Œuvres
poétiques I. Paris: Gallimard.
Aragon, Louis (1952). Avez-vous lu Hugo? Paris:
Éditeurs français réunis.
Baudelaire, Charles (1976). Œuvres complètes II, ed.
Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard.
Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (eds.) (2000). Six
French Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (eds.) (2001a). Selected
Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (eds.) (2001b). A
Bilingual Edition of the Major Epics of Victor
Hugo, 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press.
Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (eds.) (2002). Contemplations, Lyrics, and Dramatic Monologues by
Victor Hugo. North Charleston, SC: Imprint
Books.
Blackmore, E. H. and A. M. (eds.) (2004). The
Essential Victor Hugo. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Butor, Michel (1964). Répertoire II. Paris: Éditions
de minuit.
Frey, John A. (1988). ‘‘Les Contemplations’’ of Victor
Hugo: The Ash Wednesday Liturgy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Gaudon, Jean (1969). Le Temps de la contemplation.
Paris: Flammarion.
Grant, Richard B. (1979). ‘‘Sequence and Theme
in Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales.’’ PMLA, 94:
894-908.
Grimaud, Michel, et al. (1994). ‘‘Victor Hugo.’’
In David Baguley, ed. A Critical Bibliography of
French Literature 5: The Nineteenth Century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, vol. 1:
208-31.
Houston, John Porter (1988). Victor Hugo, 2nd
edn. Boston: Twayne.
Hugo, Victor (1880-5). Œuvres complètes, 46 vols.
Paris: Hetzel.
Hugo, Victor (1886-1902). Œuvres inédites, 16
vols. Paris: Hetzel.
Ireson, J. C. (1997). Victor Hugo: A Companion to his
Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Leavis, F. R. (1948). The Great Tradition. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Leuilliot, Bernard (1985). ‘‘Odes et ballades: Notice
et notes.’’ In Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa
(gen. eds.), Victor Hugo, Poésie I. Paris: Laffont,
pp. 1050-64.
Marzials, Frank T. (1888). Life of Victor Hugo.
London: Walter Scott.
Millet, Claude (1985). ‘‘L’Art d’être grand-père: Notice et notes.’’ In Jacques Seebacher and Guy
Rosa (gen. eds.), Victor Hugo, Poésie III. Paris:
Laffont, pp. 1446-53.
Nash, Suzanne (1976). ‘‘Les Contemplations’’ of Victor Hugo: An Allegory of the Creative Process.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rochette, Auguste (1911). L’Alexandrin chez Victor
Hugo. Lyons: Emmanuel Vitte.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1985). Paroles de Victor Hugo.
Paris: Éditions sociales/Messidor.
Venzac, Géraud (1955). Les Origines religieuses de
Victor Hugo. Paris: Bloud et Gay.
13
French Romantic Drama
Barbara T. Cooper
Contrary to a long-held view, French Romantic drama did not spring fully formed
onto the Parisian stage with the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830. Perhaps
because the controversy surrounding the performance of Hugo’s play at the prestigious Comédie-Française was widely reported in the nineteenth-century press,
recorded in the memoirs of Hugo’s contemporaries, and enshrined in the pages of
literary histories and schoolbooks from those times to ours, the work’s debut was seen
as marking a crucial aesthetic turning point. Modern scholarship has, however, put
that contentious event into perspective and has made it clear that the battle generated
by the production of Hernani was part of an artistic shift that had already begun earlier
in the century.
In fact, some of the first signs of the movement away from the formal conventions
and traditional subjects of French neoclassical drama were already discernible in
Louis-Jean-Népomucène Lemercier’s Pinto, ou La Journée d’une conspiration (Pinto, or
The Day of a Conspiracy; 1800). The piece, which Lemercier saw as exemplifying a
new dramatic genre – historical comedy – was written in prose instead of the
alexandrine (i.e., 12 syllable) verse French playwrights typically employed in works
of serious drama. Also unusual, though not entirely without precedent, was the fact
that Lemercier’s piece was set in ‘‘modern’’ Portugal (modern designating any era from
the Middle Ages on) rather than being drawn from the annals of ancient or biblical
history or legend. The play describes the successful efforts of the titular character –
a commoner who is secretary to the Duc de Bragance – to liberate his country from
Spanish occupation. Designated prime minister at the drama’s conclusion, Pinto finds
himself in a position to determine the course of the nation’s future. This attribution of
political agency to a person of ordinary birth was rare outside of the propaganda pieces
written during the French Revolution and seems to announce later Romantic dramas
such as Hugo’s Ruy Blas (1838), albeit with a more positive outcome.
Despite Pinto’s designation as a comedy, Stendhal – an important theorist of French
Romantic drama – would later write, in his essay on Racine et Shakespeare (1823-5),
French Romantic Drama
225
that ‘‘Notre tragédie nouvelle ressemblera beaucoup à Pinto, le chef-d’œuvre de
M. Lemercier’’ (Our new [Romantic] tragedy will be very much like Lemercier’s
masterpiece, Pinto; Stendhal 1970: 75).1 Lemercier’s play appealed to Stendhal as a
model for Romantic drama for several reasons. In Racine et Shakespeare, Stendhal rejects
alexandrine verse as a vehicle for dramatic expression because it calls attention to itself
and to the beauty of language rather than allowing for the realistic and straightforward representation of ideas and actions. He contends, moreover, that ‘‘[s]i la police
laissait jouer Pinto, en moins de six mois le public ne pourrait plus supporter les
conspirations en vers alexandrins’’ (if the police allowed Pinto to be performed, in less
than six months the public would no longer be willing to tolerate conspiracies in
alexandrine verse; Stendhal 1970: 97). Stendhal also believed that tragedy must be
relevant to the concerns of contemporary audiences, reflecting their historical experiences and worldviews rather than those of previous generations. Racine’s plays might
have been ‘‘modern’’ in the seventeenth century (suited to the tastes of that day),
Stendhal averred, but they were no longer meaningful in the nineteenth century.
Neither were more recent tragedies written in line with seventeenth-century aesthetic
models. ‘‘Je ne vois que Pinto qui ait été fait pour des Français modernes’’ (As far as I
can see, Pinto is the only work that’s been made for modern Frenchmen), he declared
(Stendhal 1970: 96-7).
Pinto did not meet another of Stendhal’s criteria for modern, Romantic drama,
however: the abandonment of the neoclassical unities of time and place. Historical
events, Stendhal held, could not be understood in all their complexity if a drama was
allowed to show only the final hours before the resolution of a crisis and was limited
to a single location. Lemercier was less persuaded of this than Stendhal would be and
thus did not abandon the temporal and spatial constraints typical of the French
neoclassical dramatic aesthetic until he wrote Christophe Colomb (Christopher Columbus, 1809), a three-act verse drama designated a ‘‘Shakespearean comedy.’’ Declaring
the unities of time and place uniquely incompatible with the story of Columbus’s
attempt to discover the New World, Lemercier apologized in advance for his break
with French neoclassical tradition and cautioned other dramatists not to imitate his
formal ‘‘irregularities’’ in their plays. The playwright’s repudiation of dramatic
innovation and the work’s generic label notwithstanding, Colomb surely deserves to
be seen as a proto-Romantic drama not only because it violates the unities of time and
place, moves beyond the usual stylistic and metrical restrictions of French neoclassical
drama, and mixes comic and serious elements together, but also because it prefigures
the Romantic preoccupation with the isolation and alienation of those individuals
whose status or genius sets them apart from society. What is more, if we read
Lemercier’s account of Columbus’s journey as a failed quest – as the temporary
frustration of the explorer’s dreams of renown and prestige at the end of the piece
invites us to do – we can see that Columbus clearly announces ‘‘... the Romantic
character who must struggle to create himself a hero in opposition to an unheroic
world’’ (Cox 1994: 157). The suicide of the eponymous poet-hero at the conclusion of
Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (1834) and the death of the titular character in Musset’s
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Lorenzaccio (1834) will underscore, with even greater finality than Lemercier suggests
here, the inevitable outcome of such an endeavor in Romantic drama.
Lemercier’s subjects in Pinto and Colomb illustrate one of the distinguishing features
of French Romantic drama: its preoccupation with moments of social or political
tensions and transformations in the creation of national and/or individual destiny. Of
course, Lemercier was neither the first nor the only playwright who sought to renew
French dramaturgy via the introduction of modern historical subjects. Neither did he
fully exploit, as French melodramatists and Romantic dramatists would do, the
elements of local color and spectacle inherent in his chosen topics.
Like Lemercier, René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, the father of French melodrama, frequently wove modern historical subjects into his plays. Pizarre, ou La
Conquête du Pérou (Pizarro, or The Conquest of Peru; 1802) is the first melodrama
that Pixérécourt seems to have labeled as historique (historical), but it is another work so
designated, Tékéli, ou Le Siège de Montgatz (Tékéli, or The Siege of Montgatz; 1803), that
provides a more typical and commercially successful model of the genre. A three-act
prose drama enhanced by music, dance, and special effects, Tékéli recounts the efforts of
a Hungarian nobleman (Count Tékéli) to return home from exile and imprisonment to
reclaim his sovereign rights and embrace his beloved wife, Axelina. To do this, he must
escape detection by the Austrian forces occupying his country and arrive at the walled
city of Montgatz in time to lead a group of besieged patriots in a final battle against the
Austrians. Although the play recalls real historical events, Pixérécourt is less concerned
with the faithful reproduction of facts than with the representation of a morally
unambiguous (Manichean) universe filled with touching emotions and vivid spectacle.
The playwright uses picturesque sets and distinctive costumes and customs to bring
local color to the incidents showcased in his drama and dazzling stage effects that draw
the viewer into sympathetic engagement with the (virtuous) characters in his play.
Some of these features, especially those that contribute to the concrete immediacy and
presentness of time, place, and action in Pixérécourt’s work, announce important dimensions of Romantic drama rarely, if ever, found in nineteenth-century French neoclassical
tragedies whose typical decor was a single, indistinguishable antechamber (palais à
volonté ). The use of plural settings in melodrama and Romantic drama announces more
than just an aesthetic shift away from abstract words and locales toward emotionally
expressive speech and distinctive physical spaces; it also points to a fundamentally
changed perception of story and history and of the role context plays in determining the
outcome of all human undertakings and longings. Hugo would later outline his view of
the importance of the world in the ‘‘Preface’’ to his play, Cromwell (1827), where he
wrote that the depiction of the place in which an action occurred made the representation of that action appear more genuine.
There are other early playwrights – Casimir Delavigne, Prosper Mérimée, and
Ludovic Vitet among them – whose role in the move toward French Romantic drama
likewise deserves recognition. All three of these men used modern history as the basis
for some or all of their works and highlighted social or political tensions in their
plays. Mérimée and Vitet wrote closet dramas (i.e., works destined to be read rather
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than performed) and could thus take aesthetic and ideological liberties they might not
have otherwise been allowed in the theater. It is also important to acknowledge,
however briefly, the significant role played by essayists, translators, and theoreticians
such as Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, Alessandro Manzoni,
and Stendhal who helped to shape Romantic drama. It is impossible to detail here the
arguments they advanced in their pamphlets and prefaces, but each of these writers, in
her or his own way, helped to spark discussion and shape the debate over the forms,
the subjects, and the significance of tragedy in the modern world. Whether through
translation and commentary (Constant adapted and commented on Schiller’s Wallenstein; Guizot presented Shakespeare) or analysis of foreign dramatic models (Staël wrote
about German playwrights and aesthetics in De l’Allemagne [On Germany], Stendhal
about Shakespeare), each challenged the continuing pertinence and hegemony of
French neoclassical dramaturgy and offered suggestions or guidelines for a new type
of drama more suited to the times. Their writings, together with the translation of the
novels of Walter Scott and the performances of British actors and actresses in Paris in
1822 and 1827, served both as a stimulus to and a justification for change. Indeed, there
are many examples of early nineteenth-century French plays derived from the texts of
Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Scott, including Lemercier’s Richard III et Jeanne
Shore (Jane Shore, 1824), Pixérécourt’s and Benjamin Antier’s Guillaume Tell (William
Tell, 1828), and Alfred de Vigny’s Le More de Venise (The Moor of Venice [Othello],
1829). The goal of writers like Staël, Constant, and Stendhal was not to substitute a
German or an English model for the traditional French one. Instead, they highlighted
the value of ‘‘modern’’ (especially national historical) subjects and proposed a range of
politically and aesthetically liberal options (including the freedom to reject the unities
of time and place, to ignore the stifling constraints of stage decorum and alexandrine
verse, to benefit from the inclusion of local color, etc.).
It was, however, Victor Hugo’s ‘‘Preface’’ to Cromwell (1827) that most famously
sought to redefine tragedy for modern times. Like his predecessors, Hugo wished to
free drama from the unities of time and place, from an arbitrary sense of stage
decorum, and from past limits on subject matter. Anything that was in nature
could be in art, he insisted. Rejecting conventional distinctions between comedy
and tragedy, which he deemed incompatible with modern experience and Christianity’s vision of human beings’ dual nature, Hugo proposed mixing together the
(morally and/or physically) sublime and the grotesque to create a drama that offered
a richer, more realistic picture of life. Local color, he felt, further contributed to that
end. If the times, places, and circumstances that gave rise to events were represented
in all their specificity, drama would no longer set forth an abstract image of the past,
but would illuminate and explain the relationship between individuals and the world
in which they lived. Hugo also believed that verse, provided it was freed from the
constraints of lexical and metrical tradition, was fully compatible with modern tragic
expression. It could heighten and intensify the theatrical experience rather than
stultify it.2 The (then) unperformable Cromwell provided a perfect illustration of his
description of modern drama.
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Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas père never elaborated a theory on the forms, purpose, or pertinence
of French Romantic drama to the modern world. He was, however, the most prolific
and popular writer of French Romantic dramas. Influenced by his readings of the
works of foreign playwrights and by the performances of the British actors who toured
in Paris in the 1820s, Dumas helped to transform serious drama in France by
combining the dynamism and spectacle of melodrama with the gravity of tragedy.
His plays were generally grounded in ‘‘modern’’ history or treated contemporary social
issues.
Dumas’s national historical drama, Henri III et sa cour (Henri III and his Court,
1829), opened the doors of the Comédie-Française to Romantic drama. Written in
prose, the play violated the unities of time and place, made dramaturgically effective
use of several different practicable sets, emphasized local color in customs, costumes,
props, and decor, disregarded conventional rules of decorum by showing scenes of
violence on stage, and took full advantage of the kind of dynamic pacing and
emotionally intense dialogue generally associated with melodrama. Indeed, the
play’s energetic and vivid portrayal of the past must have made the work seem
quite unlike any other previously staged at the Comédie.
The plot of Dumas’s play highlights the intersection of political passions with
amorous ones at a time of civil and religious unrest in France. The seemingly
ineffectual King Henri finds his reign challenged by his powerful and ambitious
cousin, the Duc de Guise. As a result, the Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, long
the real power behind the throne, fears losing control over her son and matters of
state. Hoping to weaken the influence of both Guise and Saint-Mégrin, one of
the king’s favorites whom she sees as a rival for Henri’s affections, Catherine uses
the Duchesse de Guise as a pawn. She arranges an involuntary meeting between the
Duchesse and Saint-Mégrin, whose love for one another has gone unspoken and
remains unconsummated. This later leads to a confrontation between the duchess
and her husband and, at the play’s conclusion, to the traitorous assassination of SaintMégrin. Meanwhile, Henri manages to undermine his cousin’s political ascendancy by
declaring himself, rather than Guise, the head of the powerful Holy Catholic League.
This tale of ambition, abuse of power, and the victimization of lovers reveals a
world filled with menace and hostility. It is a world governed by human passions and
actions rather than by the abstract forces of fate or divine providence. By naming
himself head of the League, Henri reclaims his role as head of state and church and
thereby reaffirms the existing order. By using violence against his wife and SaintMégrin, Guise re-establishes the primacy of patriarchal authority over love. Through
deception and manipulation, Catherine eliminates the challenge to her control and
restores the status quo ante. Saint-Mégrin and the Duchesse de Guise are ultimately
caught in the middle of a larger struggle for power they cannot control and from
which there is no escape. Our sympathy goes out to them rather than to those who do
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battle for supremacy over the affairs of state. The unequal contest between personal
happiness and political forces set forth in Henri III was powerfully portrayed in
Dumas’s piece but is by no means unique; it would become a frequent subject of
French Romantic drama and would be treated in a variety of periods and settings in
other works.
Dumas depicted another type of tragic conflict in what is today perhaps his most
famous Romantic drama, Antony (1831). In that five-act prose piece first performed at
the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin (a playhouse that specialized in the production of
melodramas), Dumas again violated the unities of time and place and the conventions
of neoclassical decorum. (Intent on possessing her, Antony breaks into Adèle d’Hervey’s hotel room in full sight of the audience in Act III; then, at the end of Act V, he
kills her on stage, proclaiming that she had resisted his efforts to make her his
mistress.) Once again, the playwright displayed a keen sense of modern stagecraft
and used emotionally powerful language. But whereas Henri III was set in the past
(sixteenth century) and focused on characters of unquestioned identity and aristocratic
status, Antony was set in the present (nineteenth century) and featured a titular
character of unknown parentage and uncertain rank.
In Dumas’s play, Antony’s intense passions and personal superiority cannot erase
the stain of his illegitimate birth and consequent lack of social standing, but it is that
same marginality which helps us to recognize him as a Romantic hero. Adèle’s
conflicted emotions, victimization, despair, and death likewise mark her as a Romantic heroine. Public condemnation of the lovers’ relationship and the play’s tragic
conclusion emphasize the impossibility of rebelling against society, the frustration of
personal ambition and emotional fulfillment in a hypocritical, restrictive world.
Indeed, in many of their plays – whether set in the present or in the ‘‘recent’’ past –
Dumas and other French Romantic playwrights would regularly insist that the
recognition of personal merit and of true love are impossible in the rigidly enforced
(but nonheroic) social order that defines the modern world.
If the passions, pessimism, and defeat displayed in Antony and Henri III et sa cour are
representative of much of French Romantic drama, so too is the richly detailed
portrait these works offer of the universe their protagonists inhabit. Apposite costumes, props, and set designs lend an aura of authenticity and historical accuracy to
the action in their dramas. Such devices serve to abolish distance and to create a
feeling of physical and temporal proximity between the audience and the characters
on stage. What is more, the multiplication of settings – an astrologer’s laboratory, the
Louvre, the Duchesse de Guise’s oratory in Henri III; Adèle’s home in Paris, an inn on
the route to Strasbourg, the reception rooms in the home of Adèle’s friend, the
Vicomtesse de Lacy, in Antony – brings layers of geographical and social dimension
to the action, thereby enhancing its realism. Not only does this scenic diversity allow
for the introduction of characters who could not plausibly meet in a single location, it
also underscores the significance of the action (e.g., the ostracism of Antony and Adèle
takes place in a space whose social character is clearly apparent) and its temporal
duration (e.g., Adèle’s flight from Paris, the lovers’ brief period of withdrawal from
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society, their return, condemnation, and demise). Emotionally charged language;
blocking, gestures, and pacing that emphasize dynamism and heighten dramatic
intensity; and scenes of on-stage violence (the Duc de Guise’s torture of his wife,
Antony’s assault on and, later, killing of Adèle) likewise make the fictional universe
come alive in a manner totally at odds with the decorous abstraction of neoclassical
tragedy.
Like Antony, another of Dumas’s works, Kean, ou Désordre et génie (Kean, or Disorder
and Genius, 1836), extols passion and personal fulfillment as important values and
suggests that exceptional individuals cannot survive in a world where status and the
bounds of acceptable behavior are rigidly (if often hypocritically) defined. Kean, a fiveact drama in prose written for and performed by the celebrated French Boulevard
theater actor, Frédérick Lemaı̂tre, offers a fictional account of the life of the English
stage star, Edmund Kean. Beguiled by Kean’s superior skill in such roles as Romeo
and Othello, Éléna de Koefeld, the wife of the Danish ambassador to England, has
fallen in love with the actor who loves her in return. What neither of these individuals
has yet understood, but what we can already guess, is that their relationship, founded
on an illusion, has no future. And indeed, the real-world forces that will separate the
aristocratic Éléna from the socially marginalized Kean are made apparent from the
beginning of the drama, initially set in the salon of the Danish ambassador’s London
residence. The conversation at a social gathering there makes it clear that Kean, who
has been sent an invitation to attend the event, is considered by everyone but Éléna to
be a mere entertainer rather than an equal of the upper-class guests (including the
Prince of Wales) who are present. Imbued with a sense of his own genius, deluded by
the apparent friendship of the Prince – their relationship is based on little more than a
shared passion for pleasure and debauchery – and confident of Éléna’s affections, Kean
sees his position altogether differently. The action in the rest of the play, set in a
variety of locations in London ranging from the Drury Lane theater to a low-class bar
along the Thames, will serve to dispel his error. In the end, after publicly insulting
the Prince and the rest of the theater audience from the stage, Kean will leave for New
York (a space of both exile and opportunity) with the young Anna Damby, an
orphaned heiress who likewise seeks to flee the constraints London society would
impose on her future.
While love is still an important theme in Kean, that emotion is neither of the same
intensity nor of the same nature as in Henri III and Antony. Éléna’s and Kean’s feelings
for one another seem less persuasively rooted in the heart than was true in those earlier
dramas. What is more, as the subtitle of the play suggests, the true focus of this piece
lies elsewhere. At issue is the question of genius or, more specifically, of society’s
failure to honor genius with the (elevated) status that is its due regardless of an
individual’s origins, and its unwillingness to accord genius the freedom from the
bounds of ordinary rules that it needs to flourish. For some, Kean’s exile may not
appear as fully tragic as Saint-Mégrin’s assassination or Antony’s implied execution
since there is at least some kind of future for him in (a democratic) New York.
However, like Lemercier’s Columbus, what Kean most craves, and fails to get, is
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recognition of his exceptional nature. This makes the actor’s involuntary departure
from the center of artistic and social distinction (London), the frustration of his
amorous and social ambitions just as pitiable as more traditional tragic outcomes.
Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (Comédie-Française, 1835) – the story of a young,
impoverished poet who falls victim to English (and, implicitly, French) society’s
capitalist values and indifference to genius and art – had already told a similar tale
on a smaller scale. More formally conservative than most other Romantic dramas, the
action in Vigny’s piece covers a period of less than 24 hours and is set in the home of a
heartless industrialist, John Bell, where Chatterton has taken up temporary lodgings.
As the story evolves, the struggling poet’s alienation from society is tempered only by
the compassion of an elderly Quaker who also lodges at Bell’s home and by the furtive
assistance of Bell’s timid, bullied wife, Kitty – a role played to great effect by Marie
Dorval. In the end, unable to pay his debts or to find a place in society that honors his
poetic genius, Chatterton commits suicide in his room after burning his manuscripts.
Kitty, who has loved the young man without overtly acting on her feelings, dies from
shock after finding his inanimate body sprawled on the bed in his room. Dorval’s
dramatic fall down the staircase shortly before the curtain rings down packed the same
kind of emotional punch as her character’s death in Dumas’s Antony where she played
Adèle. Both scenes viscerally reinforced their respective drama’s philosophical message about the frustration of individual merit or genius by a society whose values
(economic worth in Chatterton, birth in Antony) closed the door to love, ambition, and
public recognition and became indelibly fixed in the imagination of audiences who
saw the works performed.
Victor Hugo
Despite the popular success and aesthetic innovations found in Dumas’s plays and the
intellectual and emotional appeal of Vigny’s Chatterton, it is Victor Hugo’s works that
are most often held up as examples of French Romantic drama. Hugo’s recognized
status as a poet and novelist, together with his theoretical pronouncements in the
‘‘Preface’’ to Cromwell and the controversy surrounding the form and performance of
Hernani (Comédie-Française, 1830), no doubt contributed to his designation as the
putative head of the Romantic school of drama. As the head of a literary circle known
as the Cénacle and a vociferous defender of theatrical liberty – he most notably took
issue with the censorship of his drama Le Roi s’amuse (The King’s Jester, 1832) – Hugo
further solidified his position as the head of that artistic movement.
With Hugo’s Hernani, the commingling of political and amorous affairs already
seen in Henri III et sa cour is once again apparent. In contrast to Dumas’s prose piece,
however, Hugo’s drama, set principally in Spain in the early sixteenth century, was
written in alexandrine verse – a traditional form the playwright revolutionized by
violating metrical conventions and earlier standards of linguistic propriety. In accord
with the views he outlined in his ‘‘Preface’’ to Cromwell several years before, Hugo also
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violated the unities of time and place in Hernani. Each act of the drama is set in a
different location whose pertinence to the action is clear (e.g., the family portrait
gallery where Don Ruy Gomez de Silva invokes his ancestors’ honor when refusing to
betray the laws of hospitality and surrender his guest, the outlawed Hernani, to Don
Carlos, King of Spain; Charlemagne’s tomb in Aix-la-Chapelle where Don Carlos,
awaiting his election as Holy Roman Emperor, reflects on the role and meaning of
power and undergoes a moral change that leads him to pardon Hernani, restore his
aristocratic titles, and allow him to marry Doña Sol). Hugo likewise weaves local color
into the action, costumes, and settings of the play and combines elements of the comic
and the tragic, the sublime and the grotesque. As a result, despite echoes of works
ranging from Corneille’s Cinna and Le Cid to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and from
comedy to melodrama, the play is distinctively Romantic, tenderly lyrical and darkly
dramatic. The clash between partisans of the neoclassical and Romantic aesthetics that
took place at the time of the play’s premiere, while scarcely the first or the most
dramatic of its kind – the battle surrounding Lemercier’s Christophe Colomb earlier in
the century had resulted in injuries and a death – nonetheless seemed to announce the
triumph of the Romantic conception of drama.
The love story at the heart of Hugo’s play finds three men competing for the hand
of the orphaned Doña Sol: her elderly uncle and guardian, Don Ruy Gomez, to whom
she is betrothed and who offers her security and profound affection; the young and
handsome outlaw, Hernani, who offers her intense passion but no security; and Don
Carlos, King of Spain, who offers her the possibility of elevated status and wealth, but
whose feelings may well prove less enduring than those of his rivals. The first acts of
the play make it clear that the young woman’s heart belongs to Hernani. The son of an
aristocratic rebel put to death by Don Carlos’s father, Hernani lives under an assumed
name (he was born Jean d’Aragon) and is himself a political outcast pursued by the
authorities. The amorous rivalry that pits the outlaw against the king is thus paired
with a political contest that sets the two men at odds with one another at critical
moments in the drama (most notably in Acts II-IV). Carlos’s transformation in
Charlemagne’s tomb in Act IV appears to mark the conclusion of the piece. But
while Act IV resolves the Hernani–Don Carlos conflict and seems to signal the
(political and social) reintegration of the outcast/bandit, it does not settle the debt
Hernani owes his other rival for Doña Sol’s hand, Don Ruy Gomez. Thus the young
lovers’ marriage festivities, celebrated with lyrical expansion under the stars at the
d’Aragon family castle in Act V, turn tragic when Don Ruy, disguised in a black
domino, arrives uninvited and sounds a horn, symbol of the debt of honor that the
then-outlawed Hernani had promised to pay him in exchange for his hospitality in
Act III. The payment Don Ruy now demands is his rival’s death. In the end, both of
the newlyweds drink the poison Don Ruy presents to Hernani and the old man is left
alone. The couple’s on-stage demise, reminiscent of Romeo’s and Juliet’s tragic deaths,
violated the laws of neoclassical propriety which normally banned such unseemly
sights from view and highlights once again the substitution of human action for
divine intervention.
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Politics and passion clash again in Hugo’s Ruy Blas (1838), a play set in late
seventeenth-century Spain and the first work performed at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, an enterprise owned jointly by Hugo and Dumas and intended as a showcase for
their works. Disguised and presented at court by his master, Don Salluste, as that
nobleman’s cousin, Don César, the valet Ruy Blas (played with great success by
Frédérick Lemaı̂tre) will unwittingly serve Salluste’s plan for vengeance against the
Spanish Queen who has banished him. Six months later, the valet, long in love with
the Queen – he is ‘‘un vers de terre amoureux d’une étoile’’ (an earthworm in love with
a star) – has risen in rank on his own merits, but under his assumed name. Now prime
minister, he is critical of those aristocrats who would put personal profit above the
nation’s well-being. After overhearing ‘‘Don César’’/Ruy Blas’s speech condemning
the noblemen, the Queen reveals her love for him and asks him to save the state from
collapse. The married Queen’s feelings, if publicized and/or acted upon, would forever
compromise her in the rigid moral and social environment of the Spanish court and
that, of course, is exactly what Salluste has hoped all along his plan would accomplish.
Returned to Madrid in disguise, Salluste orders Ruy Blas from court and arranges a
rendezvous between his valet and the Queen in a mysterious house. After a series of
twists and turns, Ruy Blas kills Salluste, drinks the poison the Queen threatened to
take when she saw her position and honor endangered, and dies in her arms. In this
play, then, as in other Romantic dramas, the present proves impermanent, past actions
inescapable, and the future closed to superior individuals who seek personal happiness
and other rewards. The political advancement of a member of the lower class, possible
only by means of a borrowed identity, is shown to be ephemeral and without longterm effect. The play’s emphasis on the constraints imposed by widespread selfinterest in maintaining the status quo, eliminating opportunities for reform and
meritorious advancement, and frustrating true love no doubt had special resonance
for men and women of talent in Louis-Philippe’s France.
Indeed, issues of class, power, exclusion, and revenge had already figured in two of
Hugo’s earlier plays: Le Roi s’amuse (The King’s Jester, 1832)3 and Lucrèce Borgia
(Lucretia Borgia, 1833), both likewise set in the ‘‘modern’’ past. These paired works
mixed the ‘‘sublime’’ with the ‘‘grotesque’’ – an aesthetic concept Hugo had already
articulated and championed in the ‘‘Preface’’ to Cromwell. Triboulet, jester to King
François I, is a most unusual tragic figure – a physically deformed and socially inferior
individual who, by virtue of his position, is free to make bitingly critical observations
on the debauchery and excesses at court. But beneath the clown’s trenchant verbal
attacks and disgraceful physique beats a heart made transcendent by his love for his
daughter, Blanche. Simultaneously grotesque and sublime, Triboulet clearly embodies
a central aesthetic and philosophical tenet of Hugo’s ‘‘Preface’’ to Cromwell, that is, that
in the ‘‘modern’’ (Christian) world, human beings are defined by their dual nature (both
fallen and redeemed, they are part angel and part devil) and that anything that is in
nature is fit for representation on stage. After the virginal Blanche has been seduced by
the King, Triboulet seeks revenge. His plans to punish the King go awry, however, and
in the end, it is his daughter, not François, who falls victim to his machinations.
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Lucrèce was conceived by Hugo as Triboulet’s counterpart. Physically beautiful and
politically powerful but morally corrupt, she loves her son, Gennaro, who is unaware
that Lucrèce is his mother. Again, a desire for vengeance, coupled with secrets and
betrayals, unexpectedly bring about the child’s death by the parent’s own hand. In this
case, Lucrèce’s past crimes undermine her one good quality – maternal love – and
prove her own undoing. While the lubricious, iniquitous woman of power highlighted in this piece is a somewhat less original tragic protagonist than the court
jester, Lucrèce serves the same ideological and artistic purpose in illustrating Hugo’s
conception of modern, Romantic drama.
Hugo’s last Romantic piece, Les Burgraves (The Burgraves, 1843), a three-part
(partie) verse drama, is set at a medieval German court. Its theatrical failure is usually
cited as marking the demise of Romanticism, even though some dramas in the
Romantic mode continued to be written and performed after that date, especially in
boulevard theaters. Crimes of violence and other forms of moral and political
corruption lie at the heart of this work that focuses on four generations of the
ruling family. Epic in scale and tone, the piece reaches beyond the scope of other
historical dramas Hugo had written. It is almost as if the playwright were seeking to
combine elements of the story of Cain and Abel with those of the house of Atreus
and to suffuse both with the atmospherics of German legend and the ‘‘modern’’
aesthetic of the sublime and the grotesque. Love is present here, as always, as are the
themes of injustice and imprisonment which are so frequently found in Hugo’s
works and in those of other French Romantic dramatists. The conclusion of the
play is, however, more optimistic than that of most of Hugo’s dramatic writings
from this period.
Alfred de Musset
Alfred de Musset’s best-known drama, Lorenzaccio (1834), also tries to paint a broad
tableau, but is far more pessimistic, examining the frustrations of political idealism
and reform in a corrupt world. Written as a closet drama (spectacle dans un fauteuil ), the
work, freed from the limits imposed by contemporary stagecraft and censorship, is
kaleidoscopic in form and content. Set primarily in Florence during the reign of
Alexandre de Médicis, the five-act piece multiplies decors, features a broad range of
secondary characters taken from all ranks of society, and entertains discussions on
politics and art, morality and religion, ambition and love, purity and degradation.
Filled with depravity and violence, the action centers on the titular character whose
once-pure being has fused with the mask of debauchery he habitually wears while
pursuing his (ultimately quixotic) dream of ridding Florence of tyranny and corruption. Political freedom proves as elusive as personal freedom and in the end, as he had
anticipated, Lorenzo’s assassination of his cousin Alexandre does nothing to restore
liberty to Florence or purity to his own soul. Weighed down by a sense of the
hollowness of rhetoric and idealism, seeing no acceptable future for himself or his
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country, Lorenzo/Lorenzaccio allows himself to be killed by assassins attracted by the
monetary reward offered for his death.
The corruption of one’s truest, most innocent nature by external forces is set in an
altogether different context in Musset’s three-act dramatic proverb, On ne badine pas avec
l’amour (Don’t Trifle with Love, 1833-4). There, the affection that the young, orphaned
Camille bore her cousin Perdican as a girl is expected to result in their marriage now that
the two have completed their studies and grown to adulthood. But Camille’s convent
education has given her a perverted idea of men and love – an idea that has grown not
from Christian doctrine, but from the experience of the betrayed women at her convent
school who have filled her mind with their tales of woe. Stung by her refusal of his hand,
Perdican soon turns his attentions to Rosette, a young peasant woman and Camille’s sœur
de lait (‘‘sister’’ because the two were suckled together), whose unschooled trust and
innocent affection he uses as a means to prick Camille’s ego and spark feelings of jealousy.
The naı̈ve Rosette at first believes Perdican’s professions of love and proposal of
marriage. Later, after overhearing the aristocratic couple confess their true feelings for
one another, she dies. Her death creates a permanent obstacle to their nuptials and sends
Camille back to the convent with her own bitter story to tell about men and love.
Alongside this tragic tale of misprized and misrepresented emotions, Musset has placed
‘‘grotesque,’’ one-dimensional secondary characters ( fantoches) who figure in scenes of
comic absurdity that, by contrast, intensify the drama of love lost.
Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne (Marianne’s Whims, 1833) also treats the subject
of love and life lost. A two-act prose piece filled with passages of lyrical beauty and
sharp wit, it tells the story of Coelio, an Italian youth passionately and idealistically in
love with his elderly cousin’s young wife, Marianne, but too timid and inexperienced
to overcome her objections to his suit. In a moment of despair, he enlists his friend
Octave, a man who seems to live for pleasure and is never at a loss for words, to speak
on his behalf. Octave and Marianne engage in several verbal jousts, following which
she agrees to an assignation. Believing that his words have won Marianne’s heart for
Coelio and unaware that the young woman’s husband, having overheard their plans,
intends to attack her lover, Octave sends his friend to the arranged rendezvous. There
Coelio, imagining himself betrayed by Octave, allows himself to be killed. Like
Lorenzaccio and Badine, this play was not written for performance. All three works,
however, have been staged with regularity since the twentieth century and have come
to be regarded as the finest and most enduring examples of French Romantic drama.
Their portrayal of frustrated idealism and innocence, of a world-wariness and worldweariness that leads to an ironically bitter end, today seem to embody most fully the
tragic angst of the Romantic generation.
Conclusion
It should be clear by now that French Romantic drama cannot be described solely by
means of its formal departures from an earlier neoclassical aesthetic. As important as
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Barbara T. Cooper
they were, the liberalization of language and style; the introduction of prose or a
metrically freer form of alexandrine verse; the lifting of temporal and spatial limits on
action; the promotion of ‘‘modern’’ history, local color, and spectacle; and the rejection
of a decorum inherited from earlier times and of generic boundaries that compartmentalized the representation of human existence do not completely explain what
makes Romantic drama distinctive. To understand its uniqueness, one must also note
the importance of a secularized, purely human causality that, directly or indirectly,
grew out of the French Revolution. In the post-Revolutionary, postprovidential era
that saw melodrama, Romantic drama, and neoclassical tragedy exist side by side,
political, economic, and social forces brought forth new ideas and aspirations, created
new opportunities for and obstacles to success, and prompted new means of expression
and new definitions of the tragic.
Stendhal, as we have seen, saw literature as an expression of society as it is, not as it
was. He believed that if tragedy were to be relevant in the modern world it would
have to be human and historical rather than legendary, mythological, or divine;
specific rather than universal; national and individual rather than universal.
Others – Hugo, Staël, and Constant among them – expressed similar thoughts in
different ways. French Romantic drama is thus both the moral and the aesthetic
product of its age: an age of uncertainty where past institutions, values, beliefs, and
forms no longer won automatic acceptance or held universal appeal. There is often a
note of despair, a sense of frustration, and a focus on marginalized individuals in
French Romantic dramas. That is because playwrights and audiences understood that
they were living at a time when personal and collective aspirations might not be
realized, when rewards and forms of public recognition of merit might be withheld,
and when passions could be thwarted or traversed by political or social forces beyond
an individual’s control.
Changed forms, subjects, and performance styles are an important part of the
Romantic redefinition of drama in early nineteenth-century France. They signal a
new understanding of the forces that shape individual stories and shared histories and
as such are deserving of our attention. The energy and despondency that many
Romantic heroes display, the ideals they pursue and the respect that they seek but
are rarely granted are just as significant. They reflect the struggles and vicissitudes
experienced by a generation living in a period of turmoil and transition, of capitalist
ambitions and bourgeois values, and offer a key to the mentalité of those times.
Notes
1 My translation; note that all translations in the
chapter are mine.
2 See Thomasseau (1999) on the importance of
the debate over prose vs. poetry in Romantic
drama.
3 This play was the source of Verdi’s opera
Rigoletto.
French Romantic Drama
237
References and Further Reading
Brooks, Peter (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press.
Cooper, Barbara T. (ed.) (1998). Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 192, French Dramatists,
1789-1914. Detroit: Gale Research.
Cox, Jeffrey N. (1987). In the Shadows of Romance:
Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and
France. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Cox, Jeffrey N. (1994). ‘‘Romantic Redefinitions
of the Tragic.’’ In Gerald Gillespie (ed.), Romantic Drama. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, pp. 153-65.
Daniels, Barry V. (ed.) (1983). Revolution in the
Theatre: French Romantic Theories of Drama.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Daniels, Barry V. (2003). Le Décor de théâtre à
l’époque romantique: Catalogue raisonné des décors
de la Comédie-Française, 1799-1848. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Dumas, Alexandre (1974-) Théâtre complet, ed. Fernande Bassan. Paris: Lettres modernes/Minard.
Gengembre, Gérard (1999). Le Théâtre français au
19e siècle. Paris: Armand Colin.
Hugo, Victor (1967-9). Œuvres complètes, édition chronologique. Paris: Le Club Français du
Livre.
Le Hir, Marie-Pierre (1992). Le Romantisme aux
enchères: Ducange, Pixérécourt, Hugo. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lemercier, Louis-Jean-Népomucène (1976). Pinto,
ed. Norma Perry. Exeter, UK: University of
Exeter Press.
Lemercier, Louis-Jean-Népomucène (1809). Christophe Colomb. Paris: L. Collin.
Manzoni, Alessandro (2004). ‘‘Letter on Romanticism (1823).’’ PMLA, 119 (2): 299-316.
Musset, Alfred de (1990). Théâtre complet d’Alfred
de Musset, ed. Simon Jeune. Paris: Gallimard.
Naugrette, Florence (2001). Le Théâtre romantique.
Paris: Seuil.
Pixérécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de (1971).
Théâtre choisi, ed. Charles Nodier. Genève: Slatkine Reprints.
Staël, Germaine de (1968). De l’Allemagne, 2 vols.
Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
Stendhal (Henri Beyle) (1970). Racine et Shakespeare. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
Rosa, Guy (2000). ‘‘Hugo et l’alexandrin de théâtre aux années 30: Une question secondaire.’’
Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études
Françaises, 52: 307-28.
Razgonnikoff, Jacqueline (2004). ‘‘Drame ou tragédie: Les Ambiguı̈tés du répertoire à la Comédie-Française, de 1828 à 1830.’’ In Philippe
Baron (ed.), Le Drame du XVIIIe siècle à nos
jours. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon,
pp. 85-95.
Thomasseau, Jean-Marie (1995). Drame et tragédie.
Paris: Hachette.
Thomasseau, Jean-Marie (1999). ‘‘Le Vers noble ou
les chiens noirs de la prose?’’ In Le Drame romantique: Rencontres nationales de dramaturgie du
Havre. Paris: Eds. des Quatre-Vents, pp. 32-40.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1993). Le Drame romantique.
Paris: Belin.
Vigny, Alfred de (1986). Œuvres complètes, ed. François Germain and André Jarry. Paris: Gallimard.
Zaragoza, Georges (ed.) (1999). Dramaturgies
romantiques. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de
Dijon.
14
Romantic Poetics in an Italian
Context
Piero Garofalo
‘‘Italian Romanticism does not exist’’ declaimed Gina Martegiani (1908), postulating
a Voltarian critique that the literary movement was neither Italian nor Romantic. In
extrapolating the conclusions of Arturo Graf’s and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese’s
seminal studies, Martegiani argued that nineteenth-century Italian literature was a
coherent by-product of Enlightenment culture, devoid of European Romanticism’s
aesthetics and idealist philosophy. Given its diverse and somewhat contradictory
manifestations, the temptation to deny the existence of an Italian Romanticism
continues to exert a certain fascination for literary historians. As they reject the solace
of grand narratives in favor of discontinuous microhistories, these critics challenge the
possibility of establishing a history of ‘‘isms’’ that does not embed political and
cultural values into the concepts of periodicity and canonization and thereby marginalize other literary production. To dismiss Romanticism as convenient shorthand for
historiographers, however, is to ignore the cultural context of early nineteenthcentury literary production. This chapter traces the historical development of Romanticism in Italy as a self-conscious, if not entirely consistent, manifestation of
evolving sensibilities while acknowledging both its intellectual debt and its aesthetic
innovations with respect to European culture.
Intimations of Romanticism Before 1816
Italian Romanticism’s conventional terminus post quem is the publication of Madame de
Staël’s Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle traduzioni in 1816, while its generous terminus ante
quem is the political formation of the Italian nation-state in 1861. The latter provides
symbolic closure to a symbiotic relationship with the Risorgimento that uniquely
characterizes Italian Romanticism. Given the breadth of the timeframe, literary
historians often refer to the 1840-60 period as the ‘‘Second Romanticism,’’ to
differentiate its prevailing personalities and characteristics. The arbitrariness of
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
239
these limits also compounds the difficulty of reconstructing a prehistory. Walter
Binni (1948), an exponent of pre-Romanticism, stresses Italian cultural continuity
and the temporal lag between Romantic manifestations in northern Europe and in
Italy. His interpretation claims epistemic coherence for diverse artistic tendencies
(individualism, Titanism, pessimism, new empathy toward nature) that since the
mid-eighteenth century challenged the Enlightenment’s rational Classicism. Marxist
critics such as Giuseppe Petronio (1960), however, have dismissed the concept of
pre-Romanticism by stressing the rupture and discontinuities in the movement’s
relationship to the sociopolitical conditions of the period. Less dogmatically, the selfproclaimed Romantics reference both continuity and rupture when they construct
their own intellectual genealogy through the articulation of cultural premises.
What their diverse referents share is an iconoclastic willingness to challenge the
prevailing mores as in the case of the neglected Giambattista Vico, whose writings the
Romantics rediscovered. Vico’s insistence on poetry’s irrationality, the importance of
fantasy, the distinction between logical and poetic activity, and literature’s historical
and cultural specificity, provided an ideological filter for assimilating German Romantic poetics and stimulated the nineteenth-century search for a Volksgeist. Similarly,
they revived Saverio Bettinelli, a heavy-handed critic best remembered for taking
Dante to task), and Giuseppe Baretti, whose journal Frusta Letteraria (1763-5,
modeled on Joseph Addison’s Spectator and Samuel Johnson’s Rambler) pulled no
punches in its critique of the literary status quo. Bettinelli’s works introduced
Anglo-French sensibility (Shaftesbury, Diderot, and Rousseau) into Italy, and the
Romantics admired his Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti (1769), for championing enthusiasm, fantasy, passion, and sentiment. Influential as well was Baretti’s Discours sur
Shakespeare et Monsieur de Voltaire (1777), in which he defends Shakespeare’s works
from Voltaire’s memorable description of being un énorme fumier (Voltaire 1975: 232)
by affirming the cultural and historical relativism of literary tastes and by challenging
Aristotelian tenets of unity. The Romantics also esteemed Pietro Verri’s Il Caffè
(1764-6), which introduced to the peninsula European aesthetic philosophy and
which, in its quest for a civil culture, propounded a pragmatic critique of venerated
norms, conventions, and traditions. For politically engaged nineteenth-century
writers, Il Caff è represented a significant manifestation of national identity, and
provided an immediate model for the Romantics’ premier journal, Il Conciliatore, to
emulate.
In addition to assimilating the Enlightenment’s commitment to the public sphere,
the Romantics drew on eighteenth-century theater experimentation to disseminate
their aesthetics. The reforms of both Carlo Goldoni, who rejected the classical unities
and cast all social classes, and his rival Carlo Gozzi, whose 10 Fiabe (1761-5)
renounced all pretense to verisimilitude, readily lent themselves to Romantic rereadings. In fact, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lessing, Schiller, A. W. Schlegel, F. Schlegel,
Schopenhauer, Staël, and Wagner heartily appreciated Gozzi’s representations of the
supernatural. If subsequent playwrights failed to achieve a similar impact, it is a
tribute to Goldoni’s and Gozzi’s radical departures from theatrical tradition. While
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challenging the precepts of dramatic unity, the Romantics privileged historical
tragedies, frequently set in the medieval period, which they molded into a new
mythology as the cradle of modern Italian civilization. In particular, the tragedies Il
conte di Carmagnola (1820) and Adelchi (1822) by Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873)
established the theoretical and aesthetic foundations for Romantic drama in Italy.
Drawing on Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, and the Parisian idéologues, Manzoni
emphasized truth and realism in the articulation of historical narratives that would
speak to the present. Also influential were Silvio Pellico (1789-1854) and Giovan
Battista Niccolini (1782-1861), both of whom produced modest historical dramas
with nationalist undertones. Although Byron and John Hobhouse admired Pellico’s
Francesca da Rimini (1815), and contemporaries hailed Niccolini’s Arnaldo da Brescia
(1843) as an unsurpassable masterpiece, on the stage, Romanticism in Italy found its
most congenial expression and diffusion, though late, in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi.
In general, however, Italian Romantics found their immediate literary paradigms
in the works of Giuseppe Parini and Vittorio Alfieri, both of whom subsumed poetic
strategies that reflected emergent Romantic sensibilities. Parini’s poetry, a judicious
mélange of Enlightenment and sensist aesthetics, articulated the conviction that
literature must perform an elevated moral and civil function. In particular, his
satirical Il giorno and his civil odes assumed canonical status for the Romantics.
From Alfieri, Romantic culture co-opted a sense of Titanist individualism intolerant
of social conventions and political proscriptions. His odes to America, the tragedies
(Virginia, Timoleone, La congiura de’ Pazzi, and Saul ), and the treatises Della tirannide
and Del principe e delle lettere intimated a national political consciousness that left an
indelible print on the Risorgimento. Perhaps nowhere more than in his autobiography Vita di Vittorio Alfieri scritta da esso, however, did Alfieri display those Sturm und
Drang qualities that earned him the admiration of the Romantics.
Like Alfieri, the liminal position of Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) is emblematic of the
aesthetic and ideological contradictions that complicate facile categorizations. Although aspects of his literary production evince a thematic and stylistic correspondence with the emerging poetic, his deference to Classicism inhibited Romantic
emulation. While Foscolo’s epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802), in
contrast to its prototype Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther, emphasized the
political aspects of social conformity, his odes ‘‘A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’
(1800) and ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (1802), as well as the unfinished Le Grazie, infused a
classical impetus into Italian Romanticism. In the oration Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della
letteratura (1809), Foscolo advanced a new poetic by affirming literature’s civil and
moral function for the pedagogical edification of the citizenry. Anticipating a central
tenet of Italian Romantics, Foscolo argued that literature served a constructive social
function and that its quality was correlated to a nation’s political freedom. Implicit in
this contention was the democratization of literary culture, and the critique of
vacuous erudition. In fact, he admonished writers not to neglect ‘‘those citizens placed
by fortune between the idiot and the literate’’ (Foscolo 1967: 34)1 and reminded them
in La letteratura periodica in Italia (1824) that ‘‘vigorous thinking when one writes is
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
241
more efficacious in developing a style than all the grammars and rhetorical treatises’’
(Foscolo 1958: 384). Nevertheless, Foscolo maintained an aristocratic attitude toward
literature distant from the popularity advocated by Romantics. In Saggio sulla
letteratura contemporanea in Italia (1818), he described the classic–Romantic controversy as a pedantic debate and displayed little sympathy for Romanticism’s Italian
manifestations. This attitude is not surprising given Foscolo’s conviction, consonant
with English and German Romantics, that mythology is a vital poetic element and
not a defunct literary relic, as some of his contemporaries had suggested. Nor did the
Italian Romantics embrace Foscolo unconditionally: they rejected both his resigned
political pessimism and his jaded skepticism as to the value of cultural debates (cf. his
views on Il Conciliatore). Foscolo’s principal statement on Romanticism is his unfinished Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana (1825-6) in which he faulted Manzoni’s
Conte di Carmagnola for combining what Foscolo considered to be incompatible
elements (history and poetry) – a criticism that Manzoni would tacitly acknowledge
20 years later in Del romanzo storico.
The prescient intuitions that these iconoclastic writers articulated reflected the
complex crisis that invested the traditional canons of poetics. Expanding literacy and
changes in sensitivity and taste produced new relationships between emergent professional writers and the public. As printers become publishers, consumer-oriented
packaging displaced patronage-centered production, providing literary producers
with increased economic autonomy. Writers contributed translations and prefaces,
and served as series editors, thereby assuming responsibility for marketing strategies.
For example, in Milan, the Società tipografica dei classici italiani (1802) engaged
numerous writers in a literary project to promote a notion of civil tradition. Initiatives such as these provided valuable experience for the principal editorial promoters
of Romanticism in Italy: Giovanni Silvestri, Antonio Fortunato Stella, Giovanni
Resnati, Felice Rusconi, and Vincenzo Ferrario. When Romanticism entered the
cultural scene, publishers, writers, and readers were prepared.
Madame de Staël and the Classic–Romantic Controversy
Primarily disseminated through the works of Simonde de Sismondi and Madame de
Staël, Romanticism was still poorly understood in 1814, when Davide Bertolotti
glossed the adjective ‘‘Romantic’’ as ‘‘a bit more extravagant and capricious than
romanesque [romanzesco]’’ (Bertolotti 1814: 139). Within five years, however, it had
entered common usage in Italy. Because the majority of Italian literati lacked access to
the source texts, their understanding of Romanticism blurred distinctions between its
various expressions, mediated as it was through French translations and commentaries. In particular, Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813), Staël’s De
l’Allemagne (1810, Italian translation, 1814), and subsequently A. W. Schlegel’s
Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1809-11) in the shoddy French
translation (1814) and even more abysmal French-based Giovanni Gherardini edition
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(1817) laid the foundation for Italian (mis)interpretations of European Romanticism.
These texts, however, raised issues that were peripheral to the concerns of most writers
in Italy. What brought Romanticism to the forefront of the cultural debates was the
translation by Pietro Giordani (1774-1848) of Staël’s Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle
traduzioni, which appeared on January 1, 1816, in the Milanese journal Biblioteca
Italiana (1816-40).
By featuring Staël’s reflections in its inaugural issue, Biblioteca Italiana, published
under the aegis and financing of Lombardy’s recently restored Habsburg government,
advanced a calculated political agenda. Count Josef Heinrich von Bellegarde had
conceived of the journal as a means of enlisting support among those Italian intellectuals who were disillusioned by the Napoleonic experience. He turned to Foscolo,
who drafted a program, Parere sulla istituzione di un giornale letterario, before realizing
that his acquiescence entailed too steep a moral price. The Count’s report to Baron
Hager, dated March 20, 1815, legitimized Foscolo’s anxieties: ‘‘[Intellectuals] cannot
be neutral. Thus, the government must choose between two means for rendering them
innocuous: either annihilate them or conquer them’’ (Foscolo 1966: 578). With
Foscolo’s grand refusal, Bellegarde then approached Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828),
who politely declined the position, claiming to lack the managerial skills necessary for
launching a new periodical. Monti’s diplomatic evasiveness led the Count to Giuseppe
Acerbi (1773-1826), author of Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland to the North
Cape in the Years 1798 and 1799 (London, 1802) and representative at the Congress of
Vienna (1815). For the editorial board, Bellegarde enlisted Giordani, Monti, and the
geologist Scipione Breislek (1750-1826). The editors extended an invitation to
contribute to the journal, which initially downplayed its role as official cultural
voice of the regime, to approximately 400 writers. Refusal (e.g., Alessandro Manzoni,
Ermes Visconti, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Melchiore Gioia) or acceptance (e.g.,
Ippolito Pindemonte, Angelo Mai, Antonio Cesari, Silvio Pellico, Ludovico di Breme,
Pietro Borsieri) did not necessarily indicate a partisan political choice, but rather
reflected personal preferences and economic necessity – the latter being a haunting
specter for professional writers in preindustrial Italy. As the periodical began to shed
all pretense of political neutrality, Pellico and Borsieri (1788-1852), both of whom
had participated in its preliminary stages, withdrew their support. Borsieri had even
penned the inaugural issue’s introduction, which called for cultural and political
renewal, but the editors chose to relegated it to the dustbin of history, publishing
instead Giordani’s Proemio and Staël’s essay. Thus, from its inception, the Romantic
controversy in Italy was as much a political as it was a literary contention.
Staël’s article ignited a firestorm. In critiquing contemporary Italian literature as a
meaningless display of erudition, she invited Italian writers to abandon their slavish
imitation of the classics and to familiarize themselves with contemporary European,
though primarily German and English, literary production. Exposure to these new
currents, she suggested, would modernize Italian letters by inspiring the imagination
of writers to produce an authentic literature that would appeal to the public. She laced
her relatively innocuous suggestion with severe criticisms, which elicited what could
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
243
not be an entirely unexpected controversy amongst the readership. While she did not
mention the term ‘‘Romanticism,’’ it implicitly informed her argument.
Given the geopolitical situation in the peninsula, which was fragmented into eight
states and dominated by foreign powers, the negative reactions often assumed political undertones. While the collapse of ancien régime society and the Napoleonic
campaigns in Italy contributed emotively, if perhaps not in practice, to nationalist
aspirations, the restoration of deposed rulers following the Congress of Vienna
thwarted both the political and social development of a new sovereign nation-state.
Italy remained a geographical expression, which found little correspondence in the
diverse languages and customs of its regions beyond a codified literary tradition. In
such a climate, the seemingly paternal appeal to foreign models and the wanton
dismissal of classically based literary production proved offensive to many readers.
The animosity displayed toward Staël, ‘‘the old pythoness’’ (Bellorini 1975: 11),
although couched within the cultural framework of the Romantic controversy, may
have had more to do with the messenger than the message. Some within the maledominated literary establishment, perhaps recognizing, but refusing to acknowledge,
the challenges Romanticism’s democratization of literary consumption posed to an
aristocratic cultural monopoly, preferred to reject her arguments in toto. Italian society,
however, was not monolithic, and the article also served as a call to arms for those who
recognized the opportunities proffered by her proposals.
Staël’s argument did betray, however, a lack of familiarity with Italian culture, which
had long exhibited a healthy attraction for European literatures. Well prior to 1816,
foreign influence had manifested itself through copious translations that introduced
pre-Romantic and Romantic motifs: melancholic thought, obsession/fascination with
death, defense of spiritualized passions, and predominance of nocturnal and lunar
settings. These translations were frequently in verse, even if the source texts were
not, to facilitate the cultural assimilation of motifs that might otherwise appear too
strident when expressed in prose. Paolo Rolli’s 1740 translation of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, predating the Italian editions of both Shakespeare (Domenico Valentini’s Il Giulio
Cesare, tragedia istorica di Guglielmo Shakespeare, 1756) and Goethe (Gaetano Grassi’s
Werther: opera di sentimento, 1782), sparked an early interest in northern literatures.
Significant in fostering this interest were Melchiore Cesarotti’s Poesie di Ossian (1763), a
blank verse translation of James Macpherson’s ‘‘Ossianic’’ poems, and Aurelio Bertola
de’ Giorgi’s works (e.g., Idea della poesia alemanna, 1779; Idea della letteratura alemanna,
1784; his translation of Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen, 1789). In addition, Robinson Crusoe,
Gulliver’s Travels, the poetry of Thomas Gray, James Thompson, and Alexander Pope,
Klopstock’s Messiah, and two versions of Edward Young’s The Night Thoughts (Giovan
Giorgio Alberti, 1770, Giuseppe Bottoni, 1775) circulated in the latter eighteenth
century. Of course, French translations also provided access to German and English
writers. While all these texts stimulated nascent Romantic sensibilities for the melancholic, for idyllic nostalgia, for the nocturnal, and for a new relationship between the
poet and nature, the Ossian, Young, and Gessner translations were particularly influential in propagating this new aesthetic.
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If authors such as Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) translated primarily
classical texts, this was due to both personal and social temperament. Philological
(Angelo Mai, Luigi Lamberti) and archeological (Ennio Quirino Visconti, Carlo
Domenico Fea) discoveries had expanded the classical source texts of late eighteenth-century culture (Ovid, Virgil of the Bucolics) with less canonical authors – in
particular, Greek. Thus Foscolo, who also translated Sterne, tackled select passages of
the Iliad and the Catullus version of Callimachus’s elegy Chioma di Berenice. ‘‘Dei
sepolcri’’ (1807), which can be read as an evocation of Greek values, drew upon these
exercises in its poetic synthesis of the classical and modern worlds. Leopardi flirted
with Homer and Virgil, but dedicated himself to the idylls of the second-century
Greek bucolic poet Moschus, to the works of the Roman grammarian Marcus
Cornelius Fronto rediscovered by Angelo Mai, and to the Batracomiomachia. Nevertheless, Foscolo’s and Leopardi’s interest in Greek language and culture, in consonance
with that of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, should not belie their attentiveness to
contemporary European literature, which is amply documented in their works and
notes.
Regardless of the validity of Staël’s critique, the culture war that ensued catalyzed
the assimilation of Romantic principles into the nineteenth-century’s literary sensitivity. Reflecting the evolving social milieu, the protagonists waged their battles in
the public forums of journals and periodicals rather than in the private venues of
salons and academies traditionally reserved for such pedantic matters. The controversy
addressed three principal issues: the use of classical mythology (opposed by the
majority of self-proclaimed Italian Romantics who countered with history, modernity,
and popular imagination); the opening of Italian literature to contemporary English
and German influences (opposed by the Classicists, who countered with a humanist
canon); and the utility of Aristotelian precepts of unity (opposed by the Romantics
who countered with freedom of inspiration and dynamic movement). While the
Italian Romantics’ theoretical opposition to mythology would appear at odds with
their canonical European counterparts (Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hölderlin,
Schelling) who posited it as a central tenet of their poetics, in practice, the Italians
were objecting to the allegorical and decorative recycling of classical myths, especially
Romanized ones, and not to mythology tout court. They favored revivifying these
myths by returning to their Greek sources or creating a new mythology by resuscitating medieval and Christian ones. For example, although Leopardi was critical of
Romanticism, his poem ‘‘Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche’’ (1822) is Romantic
in its rejuvenation of mythological material (cf. Schiller’s ‘‘Die Götter Griechenlands’’). Within the context of the polemic, however, the reductive simplification of
mythology reflected a rhetorical strategy adopted by advocates of Romanticism in
Italy to postulate dialectical oppositions (e.g., modern–ancient, Romantic–classical,
historical–mythological) in order to establish their poetics as an instrument for
sociocultural modernization. Although both the Romantic and Classicist camps
tended to express a need for literary utility, a concern for Italian cultural prestige,
and an aspiration for an authentically universal literature, their differences appeared
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
245
irreconcilable. Biblioteca Italiana accentuated this divergence by rapidly evolving from
a neutral cultural space into a partisan government forum, which fabricated a
problematic nationalism to defend an obscure notion of Italian honor. This political
turn stemmed from the questionable premise that maintaining literary order would
also preserve the sociopolitical order. Habsburg cultural policy encouraged this
polarizing tendency because the heated pedantic debate appeared to distract its
participants from engaging in a sociopolitical discussion.
By entrusting to Giordani the first rebuttal in Biblioteca Italiana’s April issue, the
Classicists proffered an articulate critique of Staël’s article. ‘‘ ‘Un italiano’ risponde al
discorso della Staël ’’ evinces many of the characteristics and contradictions of Italian
Romanticism, which is to say that Giordani’s arguments and terminology are themselves, to a degree, Romantic. While he acknowledges the severe limitations of
contemporary Italian literary production, he refutes the strategy of foreign imitation
advocated by Staël. Sounding rather Romantic, Giordani asserted that Italian culture,
by which he meant language, literature, intellectual climate, and imagination, must
be the source for any literary renewal. In support of this possibility he indicated the
literary treasures unearthed by Mai, Marini, and Ennio Quirino Visconti. Giordani’s
sensitive response suggested an alternative interpretation of literature from that
advanced by Staël. Contending that beauty is the object of art, while truth is the
object of science, Giordani argued that the pursuit of beauty necessitates a return to
the classics, to which Italian culture is heir. When Staël clarified (in ‘‘Risposta alle
critiche mossele’’ in Biblioteca Italiana, June 1816) that familiarity with foreign literatures did not mean imitation, the ranks had already been divided between Classicists
and Romantics.
Giordani also addressed another issue dear to the Romantics: the literary use of
dialects. In his negative review (Biblioteca Italiana, February 11, 1816) of Domenico
Balestrieri’s Milanese poems, Giordani argued that dialects, as linguistic manifestations of regional specificity, had to be superseded to promote a common national
language. While his dismissal of Balestrieri’s poetry incurred the wrath of Carlo Porta
(1775-1821), Pietro Borsieri, and Francesco Cherubini (1789-1851), it drew the
support of Monti, whose Dialogo tra Matteo giornalista e Taddeo suo compare (Biblioteca
Italiana, June 1, 1816) reiterated Giordani’s arguments. Porta retorted creatively
(March-September 1816) with 12 ad hominem sonnets in dialect inveighed against
Giordani. Although sympathetic to Romanticism, which he considered to be a form
of literary pragmatism, Porta remained indifferent to both its celebration of the
medieval period and its heroic-tragic vein. He expressed his views on poetic communication in the composition ‘‘Il romanticismo’’ (1819):
el gran busilles de la poesia
el consist in de l’arte de piasè,
e st’arte la sta tutta in la magia
de moeuv, de messedà, come se voeur,
tutt i passion che gh’emm sconduu in del coeur (Porta 1975: 180)
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Piero Garofalo
(The great enigma of poetry / rests in the art of pleasure, / and this art is all in the
magic / of movement, of mixing, as one likes, / all of the passions held hidden in our
hearts)
While Porta accused Giordani of linguistic imperialism, Classicists accused Staël of
cultural imperialism for exhorting Italians subject to the Habsburgs to abandon their
cultural models for Germanic ones. Thus, from the initial stages of the debate, both
Romantics and Classicists seized upon national identity as consonant with their
respective poetics.
Di Breme’s, Borsieri’s, and Berchet’s Responses to the Classicists
An advocate and architect of Romanticism’s nationalist potential, Ludovico di Breme
(1780-1820) provided an early response to the Classicist challenge and established the
debate’s parameters. In his independently published essay Intorno all’ingiustizia di
alcuni giudizi letterari italiani ( June 1816), Di Breme articulated a cultural history
founded upon a ‘‘Romantic’’ canon. His argument, indebted to Gian Vincenzo
Gravina and Vico, hinges on the premise of cultural relativism: ‘‘changing times
lead to changes in feelings and thoughts’’ (Bellorini 1975: 30). Advancing the
distinction between ancient poetry and modern poetry, which he drew from Staël’s
mediation of Schlegel, he stressed a poetic identification between Christianity and
Romanticism. In tracing a literary genealogy from Dante to the present, Di Breme
emphasized the Italian-Romantic nexus in Italy’s cultural development. He evoked
these writers, not for imitation, but to inspire original poetic strategies. As an
example of innovative poetry he proffered the ode ‘‘Le rovine’’ (1816) by Diodata
Saluzzo-Roero (1774-1840), a poet praised by Parini, Foscolo, and Manzoni. From his
canon, Di Breme excluded those writers, in particular early modern intellectuals, who
in his view advocated the Classicist tradition at the expense of national identity.
Denouncing what he perceived as the intellectual indolence of pedants who take
refuge in the classics, Di Breme defended poetic creativity and challenged the use of
classical mythology, which he considered contrary to a lively spontaneous art.
Pietro Borsieri advanced the second major response to the Classicists. In Avventure
letterarie di un giorno o consigli di un galantuomo a vari scrittori (1816), Borsieri proposed
a socially and politically engaged literature in contrast to the arid erudition of much
contemporary literary production. To this end, he argued for the need to construct a
new culture based on popular genres that appealed to the emergent bourgeois public.
In this respect, Borsieri aligned himself with Porta and against Giordani and Monti,
in the dispute over dialects by advocating their use in literature. Borsieri emphasized
the enormous cultural abyss that prevented the masses from assimilating refined
literary language. He considered the literary use of dialect to be an effective didactic
strategy for educating people. Not only did Borsieri promote an interpretation of
literature as having to be both educational and popular, but he also argued that
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
247
studying dialect literature provided a means for both understanding and overcoming
the peninsula’s significant regional differences.
Following the lead of Di Breme and Borsieri, Giovanni Berchet entered the fray
with a disquisition on literature’s purpose in contemporary society. The most theoretically articulate of the Romantics’ responses even if somewhat derivative, Sul
‘‘Cacciatore feroce’’ e sulla ‘‘Eleonora’’ di Goffredo Augusto Bürger. Lettera semiseria di
Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (1816) extended a cultural program for establishing a new
relationship between culture and society. Influenced by readings in German and
English (e.g., Bouterweck’s Ästhetik, Thomas Gray’s ‘‘The Bard,’’ which Berchet had
translated in 1807) and personal discussions with Byron, Hobhouse, and Stendhal,
Berchet developed a veritable Romantic manifesto.
Berchet presented his argument in the guise of a letter sent by the elderly
Grisostomo (Greek for ‘‘mouth of gold’’) to his son in response to the latter’s request
for an Italian translation of Bürger’s two ballads. In the letter, the father challenged
the classical rules of literature, the need to imitate, and the use of mythology, and he
addressed the issue of popular poetry. Grisostomo first explains his decision to
translate in prose rather than poetry, thus redirecting the debate on translations to
the issues of translation. Prose, he argues, does not pretend to convey the formal
qualities of the source text, but instead provides access to its content. In so doing,
Grisostomo presents a dynamic interpretation of language of which his letter is itself
an example. The father then raises an issue new to Italian Romantics: that poetry be
popular. He maintains that Bürger understood the need for a universal, modern,
popular, and useful poetry since any other type risked alienating the public. Thus
Grisostomo argues for a poetry inspired by popular sources in both form and content,
because only then would it satisfy a contemporary public’s needs. Appreciating the
argument’s complexity, he offers to send his son the works of Cesare Beccaria,
Bouterweck, Edmund Burke, Vincenzo Cuoco, Lessing, Schiller, A. W. Schlegel,
Staël, and Vico so that he might pursue the topic on his own.
From this concept of poetry’s popularity, Berchet argues, in the spirit of Vico, that
everyone possesses a propensity toward poetry, which may be active (poets) or passive
(most people). Amongst the latter, Grisostomo individuates two groups: the Hottentots who are devoid of cultural interests, and the Parisians (derived from Staël’s De
l’Allemagne) who are so overly refined as to have cultivated a purely intellectual poetry
devoid of emotion. Between these two extremes are the popolo, the emergent bourgeoisie, to whom, the father contends, the poet should address his verse. The popolo,
however, require a new poetry – one that is relevant to their lives. In delineating this
distinction, Grisostomo argues that Classicism is poesia dei morti (poetry of the dead)
and Romanticism is poesia dei vivi (poetry of the living) because the former speaks to
the past, while the latter speaks to the future.
Frequently citing the example of German writers, Grisostomo affirms the civil value
of popular poetry and incites Italian writers to free themselves from what he considers
to be their senseless subjugation to the classics in order to construct a national
literature. As the treatise’s title suggests, however, the letter advances a semiserious
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Piero Garofalo
conclusion that retracts the father’s arguments in favor of the Classicist position: ‘‘My
dear son, [. . .] I am sure that you will have realized that my letter to this point has been
facetious’’ (Berchet 1972: 487). Di Breme records in his autobiographical Grand
commentaire (1817) that the palinode duped many of their contemporaries.
Despite its tenuous philosophical tenets, Berchet’s treatise expanded the scope of
the classic–Romantic controversy, thus rejuvenating a debate that had already grown
tedious. In his subsequent critical interventions, Berchet elaborated on ideas first
developed in Lettera semiseria. He condemned the tyranny of the classical rules and the
subservient imitation of sterile models; he exalted spontaneous poetry inspired by
genuine feelings and the moral, educational, and national impetus of literature. For
these same reasons, he rejected both the use of mythology as a literary strategy because
in his view it had no relevance to present reality and the use of an archaic literary
language because its elitism precluded the expanding literary public from participating in a cultural dialogue. His call for a popular poetry (a frequent refrain among the
Romantics), however, remained limited to the idea of making literature accessible to a
broader public. Only with Niccolò Tommaseo (1802-74), compiler of the folkloric
Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici, greci (1841-2) and author of the quasi-Decadent Fede
e bellezza (1840), would the concept assume a meaning more consonant with Herder’s
distinction between Kunstpoesie (art poetry) and Naturpoesie (poetry of nature), as a
direct manifestation of Volksgeist.
Il Conciliatore
In the wake of Borsieri’s, Di Breme’s, and Berchet’s interventions, and in response to
the partisan position assumed by the directorship of Biblioteca Italiana, the Romantics
launched Il Conciliatore: foglio scientifico-letterario (September 3, 1818 to October 10,
1819), a biweekly periodical modeled on Il Caffè. The fruit of Pellico’s, Di Breme’s,
and Borsieri’s postprandial discussions in Palazzo Porro, the foglio azzurro (blue sheet),
called such because of its color, strove to conciliate, as its motto Rerum concordia discors
suggests, the divergent Romantic currents of Di Breme’s circle (Pellico, Borsieri) and
Manzoni’s clique (Berchet, Grossi, Torti, Visconti). Luigi Porro (1780-1860), Federico
Confalonieri (1785-1846), Berchet, and Monti also participated in this cultural
initiative – though Monti soon distanced himself. Porro and Confalonieri financed
the paper, while Di Breme and Pellico served as the principal editors. They divided
the journal into four sections: (1) moral sciences; (2) literature and criticism; (3)
statistics, economics, manufacturing, agriculture, art, and science; (4) miscellaneous.
As opposed to Il Caffè (and all other Italian periodicals), national interest was the
defining criteria in determining what to publish.
Il Conciliatore, aspiring to the principles of usefulness, realism, common sense,
modernity, morality, cultural relativism, and the dissemination of truth, emerged as
the principal forum in the peninsula for the dissemination of Romantic ideals.
Reflecting the journal’s interregional engagement, its contributors included many
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
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non-Milanese. Their express desire to effect sociopolitical change in society produced
a conception of literature that subordinated artistic and aesthetic creativity to practical utility. Pellico was particularly explicit in this respect: ‘‘Literature is the most
useless of the arts if it does not have as its goal the warming of the heart of the nation
in which it is cultivated’’ (Branca 1948-54, 2: 50).
In terms of Romanticism’s articulation, Ermes Visconti’s two essays ‘‘Idee elementari sulla poesia romantica’’ (November-December 1818) and ‘‘Dialogo sulle unità
drammatiche di luogo e di tempo’’ (January 1819) represent the periodical’s most
enduring contributions. Visconti’s theoretical expositions solicited the admiration of
Stendhal, who, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, proffered an earnest
tribute to Visconti with Racine et Shakespeare. Goethe also esteemed him, though in
a more traditional manner than Stendhal: ‘‘We praise in this young man, his great
acuity of spirit, perfect clarity of thought, and profound knowledge of both the
ancients and the moderns [...] he, we hope, will put an end to the dispute [between
Classicists and Romantics] dispensing with those misunderstandings that each day are
more confusing’’ (Bellorini 1975, 2: 477). Visconti shared many of Berchet’s views.
He reiterated the identification between ‘‘Romantic’’ and ‘‘contemporary’’ while
differentiating ancient from modern ‘‘classic’’ poetry. He stressed historical relevance
as a dictum for poetic content, arguing that this was the practice of Greek and Roman
poets. The ancients, he contended, drew on actual experiences while modern poets
who imitated what these classics expressed betrayed the poetic process they professed
to defend. In juxtaposition to classical poetry, Visconti suggested that imbuing
historical subjects with contemporary ideas defined Romantic poetry. He also forcefully sustained the precept, in marked contrast with German Romanticism, of utility
over creativity in the artistic process arguing that ‘‘it is appropriate to subordinate
verses’ aesthetic purpose to the eminent purpose of all studies, the perfection of
humanity, the public wellbeing and the private good’’ (Bellorini 1975: 451). Not
all Italian Romantics shared this last opinion. Berchet, for example, while convinced
of literature’s didactic necessity, maintained in Lettera semiseria that it must also serve
the public’s emotive needs. In Fanatismo e tolleranza in fatto di lettere (1820), Giuseppe
Nicolini explicitly defended artistic integrity, contending that literature could not be
judged on the basis of utility. Similarly, Carlo Tedaldi Fores, representative of a more
lugubrious strand of Romanticism, emphasized that ‘‘all the fine arts are drawn
together by the simple desire to please; because if poetry can at times instruct, this
is a praiseworthy, but extrinsic task, which is not necessary’’ (Tedaldi Fores 1820: 10).
Reactions to Il Conciliatore’s periodical’s cultural program were swift. Within two
months of its inaugural issue, the police commissioner Trussardo Caleppio launched a
parodic weekly L’Accattabrighe ossia Classico-romanticomachia (November 8, 1818 to
March 28, 1819). Printed on pink paper (carta rosa) and bearing the antiphrastic
motto Rerum discordia concors, L’Accattabrighe attacked the associates of the foglio azzurro
as enemies of the state. Even within the not so genteel cultural debates of the period,
however, the strident tone of L’Accattabrighe drew fierce criticism, so that after a brief
run, the Austrian authorities terminated its funding.
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Piero Garofalo
With L’Accattabrighe now defunct, Il Conciliatore came under increased censorial
scrutiny. Despite its relatively moderate pronouncements and modest circulation
(240 subscriptions – a quantity that is indicative of the limited social participation
in the Risorgimento), the journal’s dissemination of libertarian and liberal ideals and
anti-Austrian leanings concerned Habsburg officials. While initially opting to exercise
a vigilant censorship over Il Conciliatore’s contents, they moved ultimately to proscribe
its publication. Its suppression, however, only served to feed the self-fashioning myth
that identified Romanticism with the nationalist movement. In a letter to his brother
dated August 1819, Pellico asserted that the classic–Romantic controversy was just a
manifestation of the irreconcilable differences between liberals and reactionaries: ‘‘The
persecutions that we have suffered, the publication delays placed on Il Conciliatore, the
continuous rumors that we were on the verge of being shut down, opened the eyes of
even the most blind, and Romantic was recognized as a synonym for liberal, and no one
dared call himself Classicist, except extremists and spies’’ (Pellico 1963: 171).2 This
reductive political and cultural equivalency of Romantics as liberal and Classicists as
reactionary belies the historical complexities. Both Giordani and Leopardi rejected
Romanticism, but the former was exiled by the Austrian authorities, while the latter
was the object of oppressive political persecution. Both Giordani and Monti opposed
the use of dialect, but they did so to promote the development of a national language.
Nevertheless, the Romantics’ conception of the nation as a dynamic reality often led
them to political engagement and to concrete action, which is not surprising given
their view of literature as a moral and civil praxis. Indeed subsequent to the failed coups
of 1820-1, many of Romanticism’s proponents were subject to forceful government
repression and detention. For participating in nationalist secret societies such as
Carboneria (and its more militant Federati branch), many of Il Conciliatore’s contributors
were either incarcerated (Pellico, Borsieri, Gioia) or exiled (Berchet, Porro).
Political displacement constitutes an important aspect of Romanticism’s development in Italy because it produced a transcultural exchange among writers already
actively engaged in constructing a new poetics. Paris and London tended to be the
refuges of choice. For example, Berchet went to Paris where he met Claude Fauriel,
Victor Cousin, Madame Cabanis, and Sophie de Condorcet. Fauriel, an admirer of
Lettera semiseria, became Berchet’s French translator for the first edition of the patriotic
poem ‘‘I profughi di Parga’’ (1823). Forced to depart under threat of extradition,
Berchet went to London (1822-9) where he produced some of his most critically
acclaimed verse: Le romanze (1822-4) and Le fantasie (1829). Gaesbeek Castle (the
inheritance of Giuseppe Arconati and his wife Costanza Trotti) near Brussels provided
a third mecca for Berchet and others during these turbulent years.
Leopardi’s and Manzoni’s Reactions to Romanticism
The turmoil of 1820 marked the close of the classic–Romantic controversy’s most
fervid period although the debate attracted renewed critical attention with Vincenzo
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
251
Monti’s ‘‘Sermone sulla mitologia’’ (July 1825), in which he lamented the influence of
German Romanticism’s ‘‘arid truths’’ and advocated the use of mythology in poetry.
Monti’s sermon appeared in the Florentine journal Antologia (1821-33), Il Conciliatore’s cultural heir. Launched by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux (1779-1863), founder of the
reading-room Gabinetto scientifico e letterario (1820), Antologia served as a forum for
significant European articles and review. Although less overtly political than Il
Conciliatore, the Grand Duchy suppressed Antologia for its perceived anti-Austrian
leanings on March 26, 1833.
Giacomo Leopardi frequented the Gabinetto in 1827, but his engagement in the
controversy dates back to its origins. His two earliest views on Romanticism (the July
18, 1816 response Lettera ai sigg. compilatori della ‘‘Biblioteca Italiana’’ in risposta a quella
di mad. la baronessa di Staël Holstein ai medesimi to Staël’s clarifications and the 1818
Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica), although published posthumously,
represent significant statements on Leopardi’s cultural development. While he
remained committed to the classical tradition and vigorously opposed Di Breme’s
views on the sentimental in poetry, his reflections transcend facile literary categorizations. In these writings, Leopardi argued against the use of any models and advocated
the construction of new literary forms. His proposal that literature seek an unmediated
inspiration from nature (intended in a broad sense that included human society)
redirected the argument from an academic textual exercise to a socially engaged
cultural debate. In essence, he suggested that the question to ask was not whom to
imitate but what to say. This poetic strategy represented a qualitative shift, which
found little resonance in the pages of Biblioteca Italiana.
Leopardi was explicit in his rejection of several Romantic tenets. Although he
considered poetry to be both an imitation and a gift of nature (the criterion he used for
evaluating Romanticism), he did not interpret imitation as a representation of reality.
His dismissal of realism had to do with poetic creativity, which he considered a
product of the imagination, and with poetic pleasure, which he saw as the aim of
poetry (not social and moral usefulness as the Romantics maintained). He argued that
truth and realism were contrary to poetry because they limited both the imagination
and the sense of wonder (the source of poetic pleasure). Leopardi was also critical of
what he discerned as the Romantics’ tendency to shift poetry from a sensory to an
intellectual activity – an aspiration that he found to be in contradiction with their
stated goal of producing a popular literature.
Despite these reservations, Leopardi shared many affinities with Romanticism. His
poetry’s contemplation of the inner life, of the infinite, of nature (even if his nature
tends to be unfeeling, indifferent to humans, even hostile, unlike the maternal nature
of Wordsworth or the consoling nature of the German forests), its privileging of a
certain social Titanism, its celebration of poetic autonomy, and its construction of
a new poetic language constituted a radical manifestation of Romanticism. Perhaps
nowhere is this more evident than in the Zibaldone, Leopardi’s posthumously published intellectual diary, which is both a seminal document and comment on Romanticism in Italy.
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Piero Garofalo
Like Leopardi’s, Alessandro Manzoni’s poetics resist reductive classifications. Despite Mario Pieri’s description of him as ‘‘the coryphaeus of Italian Romanticism [...]
Too bad that he is overcome by Romanticomania’’ (Pieri 1827: iv), Manzoni assumed
a subdued approach to Romanticism, refusing invitations to contribute to either
Biblioteca Italiana or Il Conciliatore. His first significant statement on the issue
appeared in the Conte di Carmagnola’s preface where he defended his decision not to
respect the unities of time and space in the play. He argued that these rules,
extrapolated from Greek theater and Aristotle, lacked universal validity and suggested that instead of blind obeisance to preconceived norms, each work of art should
be judged on its own merits. Manzoni qualified this assertion by proposing a new set
of criteria based on a work’s reasonableness and purpose. These moral and rational
elements characterize Manzoni’s Romanticism, which tends to place a didactic emphasis on the relationship between art and truth.
This pre-emptive defense did not still criticisms so Manzoni clarified his views in
Lettre a M. Chauvet sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie (written in 1820, but
published in 1823). The poet, like the historian, he argued, must remain faithful to
history; however, unlike the historian who superficially records past events, the poet
brings to life the feelings and passions of history’s protagonists. In a sense, then,
Manzoni rejects poetic creativity in favor of the truth, of which history is the ultimate
source. The poet’s task is to extract stories from history and to restore the human
dimension neglected by historians. While this process may entail the invention of
characters and situations, these creative contributions must be consonant with and in
the service of reality. Manzoni also drew a distinction between dramatic poetry and
the novel in which the former analyzes characters based on historical facts while the
latter must invent verisimilar stories consonant with the personalities of the characters. Precisely because the novelist has more creative freedom than the dramatist,
Manzoni considered the genre to be the more difficult of the two. Implicit in this
argument is the suggestion that the historical novel is most apt to avoid potential
vagaries. In I Promessi sposi (1840), he applied these theories by constructing a realistic
historical narrative with an evident didactic intent and by using a diction that
bridged to a certain extent the gap between the written and spoken language.
Manzoni’s Lettera sul romanticismo al Marchese Cesare Taparelli d’Azeglio (written in
1823, but published in 1870) engaged directly in the classic–Romantic debate
emphasizing those elements of Romanticism most consonant with his literary poetics.
He propounded truth and moral utilitarianism as the aims of literature, which, in
turn, had to become more democratic. In these affirmations, Manzoni infused Romanticism with Christian morality. He praised it for freeing literature from pagan
traditions and, to the usual Romantic rejections of mythology, he added, ‘‘the use of
the fable is idolatry’’ (Manzoni 1943: 606) because it sustained pagan practices that
would otherwise have been forgotten. In this letter, however, Manzoni also advanced
Romanticism’s limitations and assessed its influence as ultimately more negative than
positive.
Romantic Poetics in an Italian Context
253
Manzoni later renounced the historical novel, including his own efforts, in Del
romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e invenzione (1845), arguing
that all narratives containing creative elements are false because poetry and history are
heterogeneous activities. This conclusion left little space for literary creativity and
also underscored Romanticism’s diverse manifestations in Italy. In fact, writers such as
Tedaldi Fores, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, and several from the south (Pasquale
De Virgilii of Abruzzo, and the Calabrians Domenico Mauro and Vincenzo Padula)
expressed those darker aspects of Romanticism that aspired to the passions of Alfieri,
Foscolo, and Byron rather than to the moral and aesthetic ideals of Manzoni.
Nevertheless, Manzoni’s moral and intellectual rigor left an indelible imprint on
Romantic culture in Italy.
Sentimentalism dominates the poetry of the much maligned ‘‘Second Romanticism.’’ The designation refers to the superficial imitation/exaggeration of typically
Romantic motifs (cult of history, popularity, sentiment, patriotism, religion, originality) in the period 1840-61. Two writers subsumed under this rubric, Aleardo
Aleardi (1812-78) and Giovanni Prati (1814-84), retained a degree of artistic integrity. Fame came to the former with Lettere a Maria (1846), aimed at a female public,
and acclaim in his poetic historical meditations (e.g., Monte Circello). Prati found
success with his scandalous Edmengarda (1841), which recounted the adultery of
Daniele Manin’s sister Ildegarde, and with his poetry, influenced by Byron and
Hugo. Second Romanticism languishes in a tedious aesthetic qualified by an inability
to articulate a new cultural poetic. While Romanticism in Italy arrived with a bang, it
left with a whimper.
Let us return to Martegiani’s claim. Does Italian Romanticism exist? To the extent
that any cultural movement can be defined within geopolitical parameters, Romanticism achieves theoretical and artistic expression in Italy. With respect to the main
branches of European Romanticism, Italian Romanticism is a moderate and cautious
offshoot whose aspirations and characteristics tend to be culturally specific. The
preponderance of the classical tradition, the boon and burden of Italian intellectual
development, inhibits the grafting of the more radical outgrowths exhibited by much
of European Romantic culture. Nationalism and historicism characterize Italian
Romanticism as do the privileging of affinities with the Enlightenment (albeit
with an initial distancing from its more antireligious and materialist aspects), and
the imbuing of a civil, political, and moral purpose in art. These didactic attributions
convey the concomitant responsibility of an art capable of communicating to a
broader, bourgeois public and engaging in modern life. Perhaps its legacy lies less
in its literary patrimony than in its demystification of cultural production, which for
the Italian Romantics is inherently political.
Piero Garofalo
254
Notes
1 My translation. Note that all translations are
mine, unless otherwise indicated.
2 Like ‘‘Romanticism,’’ the use of the term ‘‘Classicism’’ with reference to literature is relatively
new. It first appears in Italy in the pages of Il
Conciliatore and Ermes Visconti’s ‘‘Idee elemen-
tari sulla poesia romantica’’ (1818). Stendhal
picks it up from Visconti and uses it in Racine
et Shakespeare (1823), while its English debut is
in Thomas Carlyle’s ‘‘Essay on Schiller’’ (1831).
Only in Italy, however, was the term widely
used in the nineteenth century.
References and Further Reading
Primary sources
Alfieri, Vittorio (1977). Opere. Vittorio Alfieri, ed.
Arnaldo Di Benedetto. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi.
Allevi, Febo (1960). Testi di poetica romantica
(1803-1826). Milan: Marzorati.
Bellorini, Egidio (ed.) (1975). Discussioni e polemiche sul romanticismo (1816-1826), ed. Anco
Marzio Mutterle, 2 vols. Rome and Bari:
Laterza.
Berchet, Giovanni (1972). Opere, ed. Marcello
Turchi. Naples: Rossi.
Bertolotti, Davide (1814). ‘‘Cronaca letteraria e
morale.’’ Lo Spettatore 1 (3): 139.
Binni, Walter (1948). Preromanticismo italiano. Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane.
Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio (1905). Storia della
critica romantica in Italia. Naples: Edizioni
della Critica.
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15
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo
Leopardi: Italy’s Classical
Romantics
Margaret Brose
Traditionally, Italian Romanticism has been relegated to a minor role in the history of
European Romanticism. Italy entered the European debate over Romanticism only in
1816 when Mme de Staël published her essay ‘‘Sulla maniera e l’utilità delle traduzioni’’ (On the Manner and Utility of Translations) in the journal Biblioteca Italiana.
Her essay attacked ‘‘modern’’ Italian literature, and urged Italians to translate and
study the new European writers of the North. The essay inspired the foundation of a
new journal, the Conciliatore (1818-19) under the direction of Silvio Pellico (17891854)1 which supported the tenets of Mme de Staël’s essay. Even before this date,
however, several Italian writers had published pamphlets which stressed many of the
principles of German Romanticism: national unity as the premise of linguistic unity,
the discovery of a popular literature, the importance of the ‘‘pathetic’’ and the
sentimental over the eighteenth-century predilection for a poetry of the ‘‘marvelous.’’
There are several reasons why Italian Romanticism has been seen as secondary in
comparison to the English, French, and German traditions. First, Italian Romanticism quickly fused with the patriotic Risorgimental fervor of the times, and was
consequently less interested in the debates about strictly literary Romanticism.
Second, Italian Romanticism remained more closely allied to the classical tradition
than its northern counterparts. Italian poets adhered more rigorously to the norms of
classical meter and prosody, and to classical themes. We may attribute this to the deep
and uninterrupted tradition of Latin literature in Italy; indeed, the Italian language
may be seen to be a modern version of Latin. The foremost Romantic poets in Italy,
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi, described themselves as Classicists, and in fact
were philologists who were fluent in Greek and Latin. We might say that Italy’s
Romantics remained more ‘‘Mediterranean’’ than their German or French or English
counterparts. Finally, it may also be true that the other Romanticisms needed to
marginalize Italy and its writers, to keep Italy as an imaginary site of the origins of
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
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Western Culture, passionate yet pure. Along with Greece, Italy was every Romantic’s
ideal place of ruins and fragments. It was to this primordial Italy that poets such as
Byron, Keats, and Shelley would flee.
How Romantic were the Italian Romantics? Ugo Foscolo may be considered a
melodramatic Romantic whose highest aesthetic ideals were Hellenic; Leopardi as
a Romantic shot through with a materialist skepticism. Alessandro Manzoni (17851873), the author of one of the finest historical novels, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed,
1827) spent his life scrupulously rewriting the novel in the hopes of perfecting his
ideal of ‘‘historical verisimilitude,’’ that is, of exorcizing every trace of the ‘‘fantastic’’
and the imaginary. This impossible goal is deeply un-Romantic at heart. However,
many of the tenets of the German Jena group (the Schlegel brothers, Schelling,
Novalis, and Tieck) characterize the work of Foscolo and Leopardi. René Welleck’s
three traits or norms of Romanticism, discussed in the introduction to this volume –
imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and
myth for poetic style – would apply to both Foscolo and Leopardi. Thus, in Leopardi’s
idyllic poems, the theme of childhood’s imaginative power prevails; Imagination is
valorized over Reason; he privileges nighttime, the moon, and the village country
setting. The Leopardian sublime is intimate rather than overpowering, not the
Kantian negative sublime. Foscolo on the other hand casts himself as a tragic victim
of civilization and its discontents; a fierce patriotic fervor inspires him; he longs for
the classical Greek ideals of love and female beauty; art and literature are seen as
redemptive; death is welcomed over any possible compromise. So, too, both
Foscolo and Leopardi are outcast poets, Foscolo out of political and idealistic commitments, and Leopardi out of an inability to forge human relationships; the former
an extrovert, and the latter an introvert. Despite their materialistic convictions, both
sought consolation in nature and in the poetic imagination.
Ugo Foscolo
Niccolò Ugo Foscolo (known as Ugo) was born on February 6, 1778, on the Ionian
island of Zante. His father was Andrea Foscolo, an impoverished Venetian nobleman,
and his mother Diamantina Spathis, a Greek peasant. At the time of his birth, the
island of Zante was under the control of Venice, the Serenissima. In 1784 Foscolo’s
father, who worked as physician, moved to Split in Dalmatia, which was also under
Venetian rule. Diamantina and her four children (Ugo, Rubina, Giovanni Dionigi,
and Costantino Angelo) followed in 1785. After the death of Ugo’s father in 1788
Diamantina left her children with her sisters and mother on the Ionian islands, and
went to Venice to stabilize her financial affairs. The four children joined her in Venice
in 1792.
The Greek origins of Ugo Foscolo mark his every endeavor, literary and political.
He defined his Hellenic island birth in sacred terms. In his sonnet ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (To
Zante), written between 1802 and 1803, Foscolo linked his birth to that of the
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goddess ‘‘Venus, who with her first smile, made those islands fecund,’’ ll. 5-6).2 The
sonnet opens:
Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde
ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque,
Zacinto mia, che te specchi nell’onde
del Greco mar da cui vergine nacque
Venere [ . . . ] (ll. 1-5)
(Never more shall I touch the sacred shores where my infant body lay, O my Zante, you
who mirror yourself in the waves of the Greek sea from which the virgin Venus was
born.)
The nexus of filial adoration for his lost motherland develops into a cult of the dead, a
thanatology, where the exiled poet dreams of a material return of his body to the
amniotic protection of the womb. Such an attitude will also mark his autobiographical epistolary novel of 1802, the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis)
in which a triangle develops between the hero’s passion for Teresa, an unattainable
young woman, and his need to return to his mother and to protect his lost motherland.
Foscolo never subscribed to the tenets of literary Romanticism. Indeed, most of his
literary production came well before the debate over Romanticism began in 1814.
Instead of a literary controversy, it was the political upheavals in Venice and Northern
Italy at the end of the eighteenth century that galvanized his fierce sensibility. Foscolo
was later considered by many to be the ‘‘prophet’’ of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento movement that culminated in the creation of the Italian nation in 1860. He
was a fervent citizen of Venice and believed in taking up arms and risking death to
protect national liberty. Like Dante, Foscolo was an exilic writer. In fact, Foscolo’s
tumultuous political life was marked by a triple exile: from his native HellenicVenetian island of Zante, from the Republic of Venice, and finally from Italy itself.
He died, still in exile, in London in 1827.
As a young man, Foscolo attended the Venetian literary salon of Isabella Teotochi
Albrizzi, with whom he fell in love. He also made the acquaintance of Melchiorre
Cesarotti (1730-1808), the translator into Italian of the Songs of Ossian, one of the
most influential literary texts of European Romanticism. Foscolo even attended some
of the classes taught by Cesarotti at the University of Padua. From early on, Foscolo
manifested a melancholic and yet volatile personality, and these years were marked by
numerous literary, political, and amorous adventures. His early writing demonstrated
his vast knowledge of several linguistic and poetic traditions and literary forms –
Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and English.
In the spring of 1797 Venice replaced its rule by the city’s decadent patricians with
a provisional government made up of citizens. French soldiers entered Venice and
were greeted with enthusiasm by the Venetians. Following the model of the great
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
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Italian tragedian Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), Foscolo composed a political tragedy
in 1796 entitled Tieste (Thyestes), marked by its controversial antityrannical theme.
In 1797 he penned two odes ‘‘A Bonaparte liberatore’’ (To Bonaparte the Liberator)
and ‘‘Ai novelli repubblicani’’ (To the New Republicans) in praise of the French
conqueror, and the newly resurrected ideal of Liberty. But Italian freedom was already
being threatened by Napoleon who, in the Treaty of Campoformio of October 17,
1797, handed over Venice to the Austrians in return for control of Lombardy. Foscolo
was forced to leave his beloved Venice in 1797, just before the Austrians took control,
and moved to Milan, the capital of the newly formed Cisalpine republic. Foscolo lived
his entire life under the shadow of the betrayal of Campoformio, in a commotion of
frenzy, pain, desperate hope, and anger, forever torn between loves and hatreds,
political optimism and bitter disillusionment. His attitude towards Napoleon was
ambivalent, filled with praise and admiration and at the same time admonitory and
critical. In April 1799 Foscolo joined the troops of the Cisalpine Legion and French
soldiers in battle against the Austrian-Russian troops who sought to undo whatever
order had been established in Italy. Foscolo took part in the siege of Genoa, on April
30, 1800, and was injured twice.
While in Genoa in 1799 he composed his first ode ‘‘A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da
cavallo’’ (To Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from a Horse) a hymn to feminine beauty and
grace. Two years later, in 1802 in Milan, he composed another ode, ‘‘All’amica
risanata’’ (To his Lady-friend on her Recovery), also in praise of the classical beauties
of the female. These two odes belong to the neoclassical tradition of the Arcadian
movement in Italy, and established Foscolo’s fame. The women are represented as
elegant mythological figures who inhabit the pantheon of the Greek female gods,
their contingent historical realities transposed into the ideality of eternal Beauty in its
absolute purity. The odes appeared to some early readers as too controlled, distanced,
perhaps even cold. Certainly the odes contain none of the quivering, perfectly
balanced lyricism and political passion of Foscolo’s three great masterpieces: his
epistolary novel of 1802 the Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo
Ortis), his elegant but tortured sonnets, and his poetic masterpiece Dei sepolcri (Of
Tombs) of 1807.
In 1803 Foscolo published together his two odes and 12 sonnets. The 12 sonnets
(1802-3) are gemlike masterpieces that excel at fusing classical control with Romantic
emotion. The sonnet structure strains to contain the unresolved passions of the exiled
Foscolo: nostalgia for his lost motherland, an almost erotic attraction to night and
death, and grief for his dead brother Giovanni. We have already mentioned his sonnet
to his island birthplace ‘‘A Zacinto.’’ Another sonnet ‘‘Alla sera’’ (To the Evening)
sings a love song to the evening, whose coming is cherished by the poet because the
evening is the image of the ‘‘fatal quiet of death.’’
Two of the sonnets are self-portraits, and present the poet as a turbulent Romantic
hero, ‘‘rich in virtues and vices,’’ who praises Reason yet follows wherever his pleasure
leads, and who will find peace only in death (‘‘Solcata ho fronte’’ [Furrowed is my
brow]). The sonnet to his brother Giovanni, upon his youthful suicide, is deeply
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moving: Foscolo imagines that one day he ‘‘will sit at the side of his tomb’’ on Zante
where their mother lives, to ‘‘mourn the lost flower of his youthful years’’ (. . . . me
vedrai seduto / su la tua pietra, o fratel mio, gemendo /il fior de’ tuoi gentili anni
caduto, ll. 2-4). The cult of the tomb and death finds its origin here in these
passionate sonnets.
In 1803 Foscolo published a commentary to Catullus’s The Lock of Berenice (La
chioma di Berenice). Although the work was intended to satirize the pedantry of the
philological style of editing then in vogue in Italy, the volume is most notable for
demonstrating Foscolo’s own considerable philological gifts. In this work Foscolo
holds that poetry arises from the encounter between contemporary passions and the
timeless dimension of myth. This is indeed the distinguishing feature of Foscolo’s
greatest works, which are imprinted with the immediacy of contemporary historical
and political exigencies yet presented in the suspended light of myth.
Foscolo’s next works forever changed the course of Italian literature. In these same
years, 1798-1802, he wrote and published the first version of the Last Letters of Jacopo
Ortis, a passionate autobiographical epistolary novel. In 1807 Foscolo published his
brilliant long poem Of Tombs. These works show a sublime blend of the personal, the
historical, and the fantastic. Thematically, they are based on an idealized form of
Classicism, but the fervor and mode of expression are undeniably Romantic. And
although they bear traces of specific influences, they appeared on the Italian literary
scene with unprecedented novelty and force.
The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a novel that defies categorization. It represented a
new genre in Italy even though its epistolary structure can be traced back to
eighteenth-century novels such as Richardson’s Pamela. The mixture of autobiographical data, historical vicissitudes, literary borrowings, and a nature wholly wild and
fantastic, lend an almost Gothic tone to the work. There were two obvious European
precedents, La Nouvelle Héloı̈se by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761), with its disdain for
corrupt society; and more especially, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe (1774), which created the mold for the artistic hero, with his hopeless
passion, intense communion with nature, isolation from society as a whole, and
eventual suicide.
Yet the autobiographical dimension of the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis prevails, and
the fictional frame of the epistolary novel allows the author to present confused,
fragmentary, contradictory, and confessional information to his interlocutor, his best
friend (and eventual editor of the novel), Lorenzo. In the figure of Teresa, Jacopo’s
beloved, Foscolo has melded features and attributes of three of his loves. The novel
was first planned while Foscolo was still in Venice. In its inception, it was to be a love
story inspired by Petrarch. Indeed, the original title was Letters to Laura; the Petrarchan influence remains in one of the sections of the novel entitled ‘‘Fragment of the
Story of Lauretta.’’ Yet the aftermath of the Treaty of Campoformio inspired Foscolo
to reconceptualize the novel primarily in terms of political disappointment, with the
love interest assuming a secondary importance. Once Foscolo read The Sorrows of Young
Werther, he made other changes as well. Foscolo decided to have Jacopo address the
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
261
majority of the letters to his best friend Lorenzo, just as Werther writes his letters to
his friend Wilhelm in Goethe’s novel. Both works will portray a restless passionate
young man driven to suicide as the society around him collapses.
The novel recounts the bitter disappointments of the hero Jacopo, Foscolo’s alter
ego, in love, in politics, and in his melancholic attachment to his motherland, and to
his mother. Indeed this nexus of female figures – cradle, womb, mother, nation, and
beloved – will be developed into the single erotic force which motivates all of
Foscolo’s work, and will be ultimately identified with the cult of death. The underlying tensions of the novel reflect the existential crisis of the author, who is torn
between believing in the mechanistic laws of nature and his enthrallment to his
individual subjectivity; torn, that is, between the precepts of Rationalism and
Romanticism.
The first line of the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis foreshadows its conclusion: ‘‘The
sacrifice of our homeland is complete. All is lost, and life remains to us – if indeed we
are allowed to live – only so that we may lament our misfortunes, and our shame’’
(Foscolo 2002). The ideals of love, liberty, beauty, and art will, one by one, be
destroyed by the harsh realities of the contemporary society. The Treaty of Campoformio exiles the eponymous hero Jacopo from his homeland. He falls in love with
Teresa, and despite the fact that she returns Jacopo’s feelings, she has been promised to
another man (Edoardo) in an arranged marriage, which suits her father’s financial
exigencies. Upon his first meeting with Teresa, Jacopo hyperbolically writes to his
friend: ‘‘I have seen her, Lorenzo, ‘the divine maiden’ [ . . . ] I went home with my
heart full of joy. What can I say? Is the sight of beauty enough to lay to rest all the
suffering of us sad mortals?’’(2002: 10). Teresa’s father, Signor T., and Edoardo are the
villains of the story, men who live according to conventional morality and economic
exigencies, men without hope, illusions, or passion. Jacopo is unable to accept
conventional morality or to compromise with it. Suicide becomes the only and the
necessary solution.
In this sense, the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a pre-eminently Romantic work, even
though it was written before the Romantic controversy officially developed in Italy.
While the fierce classical and biblical heroes of the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri may be
the ancestors of Jacopo, the novel is clearly grounded in contemporary Italy. Beyond
this, it bears the unique Italian Romantic stamp of being deeply classical in its
appreciation of the cult of beauty and female grace. Yet the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
remains an astute psychological portrait of the sensitive soul of a young person faced
with the loss of all illusion, of all faith. In this way it is also a sociologically accurate
portrait of a society undergoing tremendous change, awash in a sea of conflicting
political and moral models. The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is certainly Italy’s first
novel, and perhaps its first historical novel. Whether Jacopo is a fully realized
character, logically and artistically homogeneous – a question posed even the by the
first critics – can remain undecided. The mutability, complexity, and hyperbolic
nature of the character, and the fragmentary nature of the narrative, confer upon it
an undeniable authenticity. In one of the last fragments that Jacopo writes to his
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friend Lorenzo, he invokes Death in terms consonant with his love sonnet to the
evening, the image of death (‘‘Alla sera’’): ‘‘O Death [ . . . ] You are a necessary part of
Nature. By now you hold no more terror for me. To me you are like a sleep in the
evening, rest after labour’’ (Foscolo 2002: 124). The novel was published in subsequent editions in Zurich in 1816, and in London in 1817.
The astonishing innovation of the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is matched by Of Tombs,
published in 1807, a brilliant political poem responding to the historical situation of
Foscolo’s day (in this same year he brought out his translation of the first book of
Homer’s Iliad ). Of Tombs has a political purpose, and the opening contemplation of
the sepulchre moves quickly to a catalogue of the great Italian men buried in the
Florentine church of Santa Croce, to finally, Greek battlefields and tombs. It is a call
to action. As such, it follows no clear line of thought. The poem charts the inner
debate of Foscolo who does not believe in an afterlife, who follows the precepts of
eighteenth-century mechanistic materialism, but who understands that political
unity can only be engendered by mourning the dead.
Foscolo’s poem is a response to the 1804 Napoleonic Edict of Saint Cloud, which
forbade the burial of the dead in marked graves and within the city limits. Against
Napoleon’s prohibition to name the dead, Foscolo’s constructs a poem in which
naming the dead becomes the primal sacred act of community building. Here Foscolo
elaborates his own ars poetica, conceptualizing the grave as the place that most
nourishes human memory, the tie that binds the dead to the living. The grave is
the custodian of the past, and bestows eternal life upon human and civic values
against the erosion of time. Of Tombs, written in unrhymed verses of 11 syllables
(endecasillabi sciolti), opens as a voice eerily questions life within the tomb:
All’ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urne
confortate di pianto è forse il sonno
della morte men duro? [ . . . ] (ll.1-3)
(In the shadow of the cypress trees and kept within funerary urns comforted by weeping,
is the sleep of death perhaps less bitter?)
The poem continues for 295 verses to answer this rhetorical question in the affirmative. All thing pass into nothingness; but the memory of great deeds and great men,
nourished by the tears of mourning, will keep civilization alive, and will engender
new acts of heroism. The poem praises the work of women, traditionally the mourners
of the dead, as the guardians of the tombs and of the stories we tell about the virtuous.
‘‘Only those who leave no legacy of human affection have little joy in funerary urns.’’
Foscolo will describe this loving bond between the living and the dead as heavenly.
‘‘Heavenly is this correspondence of loving feelings, a heavenly gift to humans’’ (‘‘. . . .
Celeste è questa / corrispondenza d’amorosi sensi, / celeste dote è negli umani,’’ ll.
29-31). Following the philosophy of the early eighteenth-century Neapolitan writer
Giambattista Vico (in his New Science of 1725), Foscolo posits that the burial of the
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
263
dead, along with the institution of marriage, is one of the constitutive elements of
human civilization. ‘‘The urns of the strong fire the strong soul to excellent deeds.’’ As
Foscolo had written elsewhere, his subject was ‘‘the resurrection of nations,’’ and ‘‘not
the resurrection of bodies.’’
Then, in a rapid transition from the Italian tombs to the world of universalizing
Greek mythology, Foscolo describes the Muses guarding Greek sepulchres, and
singing; their ‘‘harmony overcomes the silence of a thousand centuries.’’ This stirring
political poem closes with the words of Cassandra who foresees the wandering poet
Homer as he enters the tombs, embraces the funerary urns, and interrogates them for
their tales of heroism. ‘‘The secret caves will moan, and the tombs will narrate all.’’
Homer’s song will soothe the tormented souls, and blood shed for one’s motherland
will thus be immortalized ‘‘as long as the Sun shines upon human sorrows’’
(‘‘ . . . finchè il Sole / risplenderà su le sciagure umane,’’ ll. 294-5).
If we were to isolate the astounding originality of Foscolo’s conception of poetry, we
would have to highlight the interconnection between death, poetry, and a secular
eternity. Foscolo understood that poetry was the source of human creativity and of the
human fantasy. Poetry’s capacity to give shape to the fleetingness of human life can
bestow a form of immortality upon the contingency of human existence. His aesthetic
belief in the transcendent universal value of Myth and Beauty was at war with his
Enlightenment, rationalistic rigor and skepticism, his materialism, as well as with
his idiosyncratic autobiographical obsessions, with his desire to make a myth of his
own life. It may be that these tensions and oppositions created the catalytic passion of
Foscolo’s works; it may also be that they gave rise as well to what has been perceived as
the difficulty of his poetic style. Foscolian syntax is characterized by its extreme
elasticity and tension; the lyrics move from epigraphic, aphoristic brevity to deeply
embedded long Latinate phrases. The poetic verse may be abruptly interrupted by
semicolons or dashes; or may overflow the metric line with complex enjambements for
many verses. As Lord Byron acutely noted, at this point in time Foscolo had ‘‘proved
his genius but not fixed its fame, nor done his utmost.’’
In 1808 Foscolo was appointed to the Chair of Eloquenza (Italian and Latin
Literature) at the University of Pavia. In January of the following year he delivered
his inaugural speech on the ‘‘Origin and Role of Literature,’’ which posits the origins
of literature and those of civilization as one with allegory and augury. But the French
government decided that eloquence was no longer to be taught at the university, and
the Chair was withdrawn. Foscolo had difficult relations with Milanese society
because of his anti-Napoleonic sentiments. This attitude informs his second tragedy,
Ajace (Ajax) written in 1811. Foscolo left Lombardy for Florence; here he began the
long neoclassical poem Le Grazie (The Graces) which he never completed. The three
hymns, dedicated to the sculptor Antonio Canova, were inspired by his neoclassical
sculptures. While the Canova sculptures actually represent three classical goddesses,
Venus, Vesta, and Pallas, to whom the hymns are dedicated, Foscolo chose to entitle
his poem Le Grazie (the three Graces, who bring civilization and comfort to the
human race, were Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia). Once again, Foscolo posits that
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poetry and its sublime ideality of beauty is the constitutive force of human civilization and the only refuge from the chaos of the contemporary world. In 1813, the poet
published his brilliant translation into Italian of Laurence Sterne’s (1713-68) Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Foscolo’s third tragedy, the Ricciarda (1813)
was staged at this time, but when the Regno Italico fell to Austrian powers in 1814,
Foscolo decided not to swear allegiance to the new political authorities and fled to
Switzerland. There he published an edition of the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, and
Ipercalisse (under the pseudonym of Didimo Chierico), a prose Latin satire condemning
all manner of political and literary movements.
In flight from the Austrian government, the poet moved to England in 1816.
Foscolo’s London life was marked by the same tensions and ambivalence as before. He
was initially warmly welcomed by the intellectuals of the country (they called him the
Italian Byron), and contributed to many literary reviews. Soon, however, his melancholy and excessive personality alienated people and caused him to fall heavily in
debt. From 1822 on he lived with his daughter Floriana (born in 1805, fruit of his
affair with Fanny Emerytt), falling into destitution, yet never ceasing his prodigious
activity as a writer and literary critic. Among these numerous publications, his essays
on Petrarch, on the Divine Comedy, and on Italian narrative and drama, remain
extremely important contributions to the history of literary criticism. In 1818 he
wrote an ‘‘Essay on the Present Literature of Italy’’ in which he spoke of the
contemporary Italian debate between ‘‘classical’’ and ‘‘Romantic’’ as ‘‘an idle question.’’
The Romanticists in Italy were in favor of rejecting the use of classical mythology in
literature; in contradistinction, the recovery of social, political, and aesthetic virtues
from the ancients was Fosolo’s persistent dream.
Ugo Foscolo died completely forgotten, in Turnham Green, England, on September
10, 1827. He was 49. He was buried in the cemetery of Chiswick; in 1871 his remains
were taken to Florence, and laid to rest in the church of Santa Croce, in the very site
and among the very tombs that he had elegized in his superb poem Of Tombs.
Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi is one of the most powerful poets of the Romantic sublime, one of
the great innovators of poetic style and of critical writing on poetic language.
Leopardi thought deeply about the principles of poetry, and about the human
conditions that motivate our need to read poetry; these thoughts led him into
considerations about the ontology of happiness, boredom, hope, and memory. Leopardi’s letters and notebooks, the Zibaldone (Miscellany), give us insight into a
vigorous and sensitive mind, and into a psyche that had to bear the effects of a
disabled body and depressed spirit. In his melancholy isolation, his affective affinity
with nature, his failed amorous relationships, and his early death at not quite 39,
Leopardi seems to incarnate the archetype of the Romantic poet. That is to say, he
fulfills the archetype of the sensitive, reclusive poet, whose life was sublimated into
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his art. Foscolo, as we have seen, represents another archetype, the exuberant,
politically and erotically extroverted poet, whose life was turned into an art object.
Conte Giacomo Leopardi was the oldest child of Conte Monaldo Leopardi and
Adelaide Antici, both of noble families. Born on June 29, 1798, in the town of
Recanati in the Marche, the young poet lived a stifling provincial life. In 1799 his
brother Carlo was born, and one year later his sister Paolina. The bond between these
three siblings, almost triplets, was intense; there were two more siblings born at a
later date who did not participate in the close relationship of the three. In some ways,
Giacomo’s childhood was happy, for while the political upheavals occurring in Italy in
the wake of the French Revolution had repercussions on the life of the parents, the
children of the family were by and large left to entertain themselves.
Giacomo’s father had provided the family with an excellent library for those times.
The library was to become Leopardi’s prison and salvation. Giacomo was educated
privately at home by his father and by ecclesiastical tutors, but at a very young age he
began his own self-education, utilizing the volumes in the paternal library. He was a
prodigy, gifted with a rare intelligence; he taught himself to read and write Greek,
Hebrew, and several modern languages while still an adolescent. Between 1808 and
1816, the young poet penned some remarkably erudite works and translations from
Horace, Homer, and Hesiod, among others. By 1813 he had composed his first
poetical works, sermons, and even two tragedies, La virtù indiana (Indian Virtue)
and Pompeo in Egitto (Pompey in Egypt). He translated the idylls of the Alexandrian
poet Moschus, which influenced his own poetic style and his choice of the idillio as his
privileged poetic form. In 1815 Leopardi composed a philosophical ‘‘Essay on the
Popular Errors of the Ancients’’ (‘‘Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi’’),
which demonstrated both his Enlightenment and religious training, and showed a
growing interest in the creative role of myth, fable, and fantasy. These latter interests
were developed in the more than 4,650 pages of the Zibaldone (composed between
1817 and 1832, but most intensely between 1820 and 1826), and in his brilliant
series of ironic dialogues Le operette morali (Little Moral Works) of 1827. The years
spent in the paternal library, in total isolation, engaged in what the poet himself
called ‘‘seven years of mad and desperate study’’3 were profoundly detrimental to his
health, physical and psychological. He suffered from neurological, skeletal, and
respiratory disorders, as well as poor vision, which eventually caused near blindness.
1816 marks a turning point in the poet’s life, what Leopardi himself called his
‘‘literary conversion’’ that is, ‘‘the passage from erudition to the beautiful.’’ In 1816
Leopardi composed ‘‘Inno a Nettuno’’ (Hymn to Neptune) which purported to be a
translation from the Greek (and which fooled even the best philologists of Leopardi’s
day), and also his first original poems, ‘‘Le rimembranze’’ (Memories), an idyll, and
‘‘L’appressamento della morte’’ (The Approach of Death). These poems already touch
on the hallmark Leopardian theme of one’s lost youth. Giacomo harbored a secret love
for his married cousin Geltrude Cassi Lazzari, and in 1817 the young poet composed a
love poem inspired by her, ‘‘Il primo amore’’ (The First Love). By this time, Giacomo
was recording all manner of thoughts in his notebooks, which were to become an
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idiosyncratic encyclopedia containing both autobiographical reminiscences and a
series of philosophical, linguistic, literary, and anthropological essays.
1819 marks another turning point, which Leopardi called his ‘‘conversion from
poetry to philosophy.’’ This conversion was in some sense a conversion away from his
religious upbringing, and towards an atheistic, materialistic worldview. Mme de Staël
had an enormous influence on his thought, and Leopardi writes that until he read
certain of her works he did not think he could be a philosopher. Her work demonstrated to the Italian poet that there was no real incompatibility between nature,
source of the imagination and the emotions, on the one hand, and the faculties of
reason and abstract thought, on the other.
There has been considerable debate about whether or not Leopardi was a true
‘‘philosopher,’’ whether or not there is a system to his thought. In many ways, the
answer must surely be yes; there are remarkable consistencies between his discussions
of the development of languages, cultures, human happiness, the function of pleasure
or boredom, and the poetic sublime. But we should consider Leopardi’s rich philosophical thinking not so much a system of pessimism as a laboratory – the fertile
ground for disseminating and exploring ideas that will come to fruition in his poetry.
While many of Leopardi’s philosophical ideas were current in his time, and thus not
original to him, his poetry is at all times thoroughly innovative and unique.
In his early years, Leopardi contrasted nature with human civilization: nature was
beneficent and beautiful; Nature, our Mother, intended us for happiness. But civilization, with its valorization of Reason and its belief in the myth of progress, made
humankind ever more unhappy. Human desires grew more complex, and consequently,
produced greater disappointments. Later, Leopardi would view nature as inimical to
humanity, not as a benign mother but as an evil stepmother (matrigna), and he considered
all dreams of progress as folly. ‘‘We are fully alienated from Nature,’’ he wrote. Leopardi
viewed reason as the enemy of the ideals of beauty, love, happiness, and heroism. These
were, as we have seen, the incandescent ideals that illuminated the works of Ugo Foscolo.
Thus for Leopardi, the conversion to philosophy did not mark the abandonment of
poetry, but rather the point at which his philosophical understanding of the interrelationship between reason and nature was transmuted into perfect lyric verse.
The fundamental theme of Leopardi’s lyrics and prose is the opposition between the
human desire for infinite happiness and the limited, fragmented, and delusory nature
of reality. This contrast is born of the opposition between the experience of every
present moment as necessarily finite and our innate desire for a feeling of infinitude.
Leopardi felt that the experience of happiness could only be elicited by the imagination: by poetic images that refigure the past as memory (rimembranza), and the future
as hope (speranza). It is for this reason that as a theoretician of poetry, Leopardi felt
that his own ‘‘modern’’ age could no longer produce poetry based on the creation of
new images (una poesia immaginativa – an imaginative poetry), but only poetry based
on the analysis of interior states of feelings (una poesia sentimentale – a sentimental
poetry). Indeed, Leopardi joined the then current literary debate between proponents
of Classicism and Romanticism, writing two anti-Romantic polemical essays, the
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267
more interesting being Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (Discourse of
an Italian on Romantic Poetry, 1818).
In his Discourse Leopardi explicitly supports the Classicist position, all the while
actually espousing views consonant with what we call Romanticism. The poet,
according to Leopardi, must always strive for naturalness and simplicity, qualities
he admired in his beloved Greeks. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and
Edgar Allan Poe, Leopardi sought to use the kind of words and sounds that through
their very indefiniteness tend to activate the imagination. Leopardi likens the ancient
poets to children, filled with ‘‘the infinite workings of the imagination.’’ Leopardi,
like William Wordsworth (whose work Leopardi does not appear to have known)
conceived of the poetic sublime as arising from our experiences of childhood’s ‘‘first
affections / Those shadowy recollections’’ (‘‘Ode: Intimations of Mortality,’’ ll. 152-3,
in Wordsworth 1950: 461). The memory of the past is always a memory of a
childhood experience. In a famous passage of the Zibaldone, Leopardi writes that
‘‘the world and its objects are in a certain sense doubled.’’4 Things exist to the extent
that they can be remembered in poetic images. Things seen with the eyes are
necessarily finite, limited; things reseen with the imagination can be represented as
infinite. Thus Leopardi stressed repeatedly that the present ‘‘could never be poetic’’:
‘‘il presente, qual egli sia, non può esser poetico.’’ ‘‘Remembrance,’’ Leopardi states, is
the ‘‘essential and principle’’ component of the poetic sentiment. Both hope and
memory are spatially and temporally distant, therefore creating images and sentiments that are indefinite and indeterminate. Poetic language, similar to ‘‘the wandering imagination we experienced in our childhood,’’ dispels the delusory clarity that
modern language and thought impose upon our experience of the world.
Leopardi’s poems are collected in the volume he entitled Canti (Songs), an allusion
to Petrarch’s (1304-74) Canzoniere (Songbook); in fact, in 1826 Leopardi published a
commentary on Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The Canti contains 41 poems, comprising
several distinct groups: a number of civic odes and several occasional canzoni; his
first group of idylls of 1819-21, known as i piccoli idilli (the little idylls); and his five
‘‘great idylls,’’ i grandi idilli, of 1826-8; a group of five poems know as ‘‘the cycle of
Aspasia,’’ dedicated to an unrequited love; and his last poems written in Naples, in
the years before his death in 1837.
In 1818 he composed several patriotic canzoni ‘‘All’Italia’’ (To Italy) and ‘‘Sopra il
monumento di Dante’’ (On the Monument to Dante). Between 1820 and 1822 he
wrote two canzoni with classical themes: ‘‘Bruto minore’’ (Brutus the Younger) and
‘‘Ultimo canto di Saffo’’ (Sappho’s Last Song). The most salient feature of many of
these is Leopardi’s agonistic heroic stance against the tyranny of destiny and its
destructive laws, and an acceptance of suicide. The political canzoni were written
between 1820 and 1821, at the time of the revolutionary movements organized by the
Carbonari in Naples, Milan, and Turin. Yet at the same time, 1819-21, Leopardi was
beginning his innovative and tender idyll poems, i piccoli idilli.
The poet returns to the scene of his childhood in Recanati. The poems are replete
with visions of the gentle landscape, the hills and valleys where the young Leopardi
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would go to gaze at the horizon and imagine the infinite: the church bells ringing, the
moon rising, the village fair, an artisan returning home from the fields, the village
maiden working at her loom. The earliest idylls are sentimental as well as descriptive
lyrics, and they usually open with some reference to or account of the landscape near
Recanati. The actual geography and objects described are just the pretext for the
evocation of the emotions of childhood, primarily the remembrance of the many hopes
he had then, and the sentiment of the infinite and the indefinite which informs our
infantile dreams. The pain of the present moment, its disappointments and finitude,
will be sublimated into the contemplation of the vastness of nature. Stylistically, the
idyllic poems mark Leopardi’s progressive distancing from traditional metric systems,
especially closed forms.
The 1819 lyric, ‘‘L’infinito’’ (The Infinite) is perhaps Leopardi’s most famous poem
and a model of his idylls. The poem has 15 verses, resembling somewhat the form of
the sonnet (14 lines), but without any fixed rhyme scheme. The poem opens with a
description of Mt Tabor, the hill in Recanati where the young Leopardi often went to
seek solace.
Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude. (ll. 1-3)
(Always dear to me was this solitary hill, and this hedge, which block the gaze from so
vast a part of the farthest horizon.)
The poet concentrates not on Mt Tabor but on what is blocked from view. Leopardi
writes that he is ‘‘gazing’’ beyond the landscape, imagining ‘‘boundless spaces’’ and
‘‘superhuman silences,’’ and the ‘‘profoundest quiet’’ (‘‘Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati / Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani / Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,’’ ll. 4-6).
This mental imaging (‘‘Io nel pensier mi fingo,’’ ‘‘I in my mind create,’’ l. 7) takes the
poet out of the present and into the boundless rhetorical figures of his imagination.
The wind he hears in the present is compared to the infinite silence he imagines. The
poem closes with the poet virtually drowning in the spaces of his imagination, as he
gives into the sublimity of their vastness:
. . . Cosı̀ tra questa
Immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare. (ll. 13-15)
(Thus in this immensity my thought is drowned: and the shipwreck in this sea is sweet
to me.)
Two years after writing ‘‘L’infinito’’ Leopardi described it as a poem that demonstrates
the production of the experience of the sublime by means of contrasts between the
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finite and the indefinite. This contrastive principle underlies both sequences of
idylls, those of 1819 and of 1828. Contrast and blockage, as Longinus and Burke
and other theorists of the sublime had also recognized, were at the heart of the
poetical sublime. The concept of indefiniteness is correlative to this notion of blockage,
as the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) wrote
about one of his paintings: ‘‘When a scene is shrouded in mist, it seems greater,
nobler, and heightens the viewers’ imaginative powers, increasing expectation –
like a veiled girl. Generally the eye and the imagination are more readily drawn
by nebulous distance than by what is perfectly plain for all to see’’ (cited in Maaz
2001: 21).
‘‘La sera del dı̀ di festa’’ (The Evening of the Holiday, 1820), another early idyll, is
also structured by a series of contrasts. The poet hears the song of an artisan returning
home after the holiday festivities, which he contrasts both to the clamor of the now
defunct Roman Empire and to an experience in childhood, when he would lie in bed
and listen to a similar sad song. The two songs are described in parallel syntax:
‘‘fieramente mi si stringe il core’’ (l. 28) and ‘‘già similmente mi stringeva il core’’ (l.
46): ‘‘fiercely grips the heart’’ and ‘‘similarly gripped the heart.’’ The return of that
childhood auditory sensation removes the poet from his present unhappiness, and
from the recognition of life’s transience, and returns him to his childhood, a time of
hope and sublime indefinite sentiments.
In 1822 Leopardi finally received his family’s permission to travel and spent several
months in Rome, but the capital city was a bitter disappointment for the poet, who
returned to Recanati to once again bury himself in work. During the next two years
he wrote the majority of the entries of the Zibaldone. He also composed most of the
ironic prose dialogues of the Operette morali, in which he adheres to sensationalist
epistemological principles and develops his ideas about pleasure. During this time,
Leopardi ceased to write poetry but deepened his belief in a materialistic conception of
the universe, viewing the world as nothing more than a perpetual transformation of
its molecules and physical matter. The materialistic base of the universe necessarily
renders false all idealistic conceptions of beauty, imagination, youth, glory, virtue, and
of the infinite. Leopardi concludes that humankind must open their eyes to the
mediocrity and misery of human life. We must look directly into the void, the
nothingness (il nulla) that is existence.
After a third brief stay at Recanati, Leopardi moved to Florence in 1827, and then
to Pisa. Here in 1828 he began to write poetry again and once again he revisited the
scene of his childhood in Recanati. This second idyllic sequence (1828-30) – i grandi
idilli – also moves between the poles of hope and remembrance, yet with a more
disillusioned sense of the possibilities of love and fantasy. Here Leopardi’s youthful
memories are described as error or illusion (errori, illusioni). The poems of i grandi
idilli return to the childhood landscapes and emotions of his first idylls, which are
now at an even farther remove. In ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Sylvia) the poet addresses a young
village maiden, who died young of tuberculosis.
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Silvia, remembri ancora
Quel tempo della tua vita mortale,
Quando beltà splendea
Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi,
E tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare
Di gioventù salivi? (ll. 1-6)
(Silvia, do you still remember that time in your mortal life when beauty shone in your
laughing and fugitive eyes; and you, happy and thoughtful, were climbing up to the
threshold of youth?)
Silvia, the symbol of the poet’s youthful hopes, died before reaching maturity. Is this,
the poet queries, the fate of all humankind (‘‘Questa la sorte dell’umane genti?’’ l. 56).
The poem closes with an answer in the affirmative, and an evocation of the tomb of his
wept-for hope (mia lacrimata speme) and metaphorically, of Silvia herself:
All’apparir del vero
Tu, misera, cadesti: e con la mano
La fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda
Mostravi da lontano. (ll. 60-3)
(At the appearance of Truth you miserable one [hope], fell; and with your hand / from a
distance you pointed to both cold Death and the nude Tomb.)
‘‘Le ricordanze’’ (Memories), the longest of the grandi idilli, explicitly problematizes
memory, and the contrasts between past and present. The poet returns to his father’s
house to remember his childhood happiness. The objects described (rooms, garden,
star-studded sky, bells tolling in the village church) elicit the return of memories.
. . . Qui non è cosa
Ch’io vegga o senta, onde un’immaginar dentro
Non torni, e un dolce rimembrar non sorga. (ll. 55-7)
(There is nothing here that I see and hear that does bring back an image and from which
a sweet remembrance does not rise up.)
In ‘‘Le ricordanze’’, the poet addresses his lost hope:
O speranze, speranze; ameni inganni
Della mia prima età; sempre, parlando,
Ritorno a voi; che per l’andar del tempo,
Per variar d’affetti e di pensieri,
Obbliarvi non so. Fantasmi, intendo
Son la gloria e l’onor . . . (ll. 78-83)
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271
(Oh hopes, hopes, you dear deceits of my young years; always, when speaking, I return
to you; despite the passing of time and my changing affections and thoughts, I do not
know how to forget you. Glory and Honor are but Phantasms, I now see . . . )
The illusion and its deconstruction cohabit the lyric. In another of the grandi idilli,
‘‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia’’ (The Night Song of a Wandering
Shepherd from Asia) an innocent shepherd gazes up at the moon and interrogates it.
Surely the moon understands the movements of the heavens, and the misery of human
life, says the shepherd. The moon is silent but the shepherd confides to it what little
he does know, that is, the universal condemnation of human life. The poem closes
with lapidary and oxymoronic concision: ‘‘è funesto a chi nasce il dı̀ natale’’ (the day of
birth is funereal to whomever is born, l. 143). Cosmic pain and the cosmic beauty of
the starry night sky meld.
1830 marks another turning point in Leopardi’s life, although not one that he
himself would label a conversion. With the help of friends, Leopardi was able to
return to Florence, where he met and fell in love with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. While
it is clear that the two did share a friendship, the poet experienced this relationship as
a bitter and unrequited love. The passion for Fanny, whom Leopardi called Aspasia,
after the famous mistress of Pericles, inspired a cycle of five poems (called ‘‘the cycle of
Aspasia’’) which describe love, along with death, as the supreme experiences for
humankind. At this time Leopardi also struck up a friendship with an exiled
Neapolitan writer, Antonio Ranieri; Fanny, Leopardi, and Ranieri became friends.
Leopardi’s letters to Ranieri in 1832-3, when he was temporarily away from Florence,
resemble love letters. Fanny, in fact, spoke of Ranieri and Leopardi as ‘‘eterni legittimi
compagni’’ (eternal legitimate companions; quoted in Carsaniga 1977: 99). Ranieri,
a mediocre writer himself, certainly admired Leopardi’s brilliance. In 1833 Leopardi,
already quite ill, moved to Naples, where he lived with Ranieri until his death
in 1837.
The rejection of Leopardi by Fanny was felt by the poet as a mortal blow, as ‘‘A se
stesso’’ (To Himself ), the briefest poem of the Aspasia cycle reveals. The poem opens
with the poet’s command to his heart to stop beating:
Or poserai per sempre,
Stanco mio cor. Perı̀ l’inganno estremo,
Ch’eterno io mi credei. Perı̀. (ll. 1-3)
(Now you shall rest forever, my tired heart. The last illusion has perished, which I had
believed eternal. Perished.)
The poet avers that not only is hope dead, but even the desire for hope has died. ‘‘Life
is bitterness and boredom, nothing more. And the world is filth.’’ (‘‘ . . . Amaro e noia/
La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo,’’ ll. 9-10). Nature, no longer beneficent,
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rules for the common destruction of all humankind, and for ‘‘the infinite vanity of all’’
(‘‘E l’infinita vanità del tutto,’’ l. 16). It may be that the Aspasia poems and the loss of
Leopardi’s last illusion, that of love, functioned as a form of exorcism, clearing the
imaginative space for his last and incomparably masterful poems.
During the Neapolitan period, 1833-7, Leopardi wrote the last of the Operette
morali, several canzoni, an ironic heroic-comic epic poem, and his last two lyrical
poems ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ (The Setting of the Moon) and ‘‘La ginestra’’ (The
Broom Flower). In these last poems Leopardi arrives at what has been seen by several
critics as his political phase of ‘‘Titanism,’’ in which he urges people to repudiate all
consolatory myths, and to unite together in the face of the materialistic powers of
nature. In these last two poems, Leopardi brilliantly places his materialist ideology
within a Romantic landscape.
‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ is in fact a palinode to his idyllic universe. Leopardi’s
beloved hills are delicately described at the incipit of the poem: illuminated by the
moon at dusk, filled with shadow, swathed in silvery color; the wind and the lonely
song of a workman fill the auditory scene. These hills will be whitened with the
return of dawn after the bleakness of night. In comparison, human life will see no
return of dawn or dusk. For humankind, the Gods have placed the sepulchre as the
sign of eternal night: ‘‘ . . . ed alla notte / Che l’altre etadi oscura, / Segno poser gli Dei
la sepoltura,’’ ll. 65-8).
‘‘La ginestra’’ may be considered an anti-idyllic poem, in that it resists the
evocation of memory or hope, of the indefinite and the infinite, and remains rooted
in the bleakness of the present. The poem can be profitably situated within the
context of the poetry of ruins and graveyards that flourished in Europe in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Leopardi’s poem resounds from the burnt lava
slopes of Mt Vesuvius where, in 79 ad volcanic eruption buried the city of Pompeii.
In his attempt to understand the cataclysmic nature of this event, Leopardi refuses the
consolation of any theism, which would seek meaning in some transcendental order.
Instead he exalts humankind’s materialistic destiny, which at least does not seek
refuge in illusions. The volcanic wasteland of Vesuvius, inimical to life, gives birth
only to the humble broom flower that is seen as the sign of the sepulchre of a lost
civilization. Leopardi creates here a radically new contextualization for the graveyard
poem, moving far beyond both the pastoral country churchyard of Thomas Gray’s
‘‘Elegy’’ and the urban environment of Foscolo’s Sepolcri.
‘‘La ginestra’’ presents a denaturalized skeletal landscape, within which the ruins of
Pompeii and the broom flower are markers of nonrecoverable absence. Foscolo’s
Sepolcri had mapped the development of the funerary inscription from its mythic
origin, cypresses watered by female tears, to the stone inscriptions that replace that
earlier language of plants. Leopardi pushes this chain of substitutions further, beyond
the mythic and the elegiac, and posits the broom flower as a vegetal sign outlasting
stone inscriptions precisely because of its willingness to bend to nature. The poem
opens with an insistence on rootedness in a bleak burnt-out present:
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
273
Qui su l’arida schiena
Del formidabile monte
Sterminator Vesevo (ll. 1-3)
(Here on the arid back of the formidable exterminator Mt Vesuvius)
Juxtaposed to the exterminating mountain is the ‘‘sweet-smelling broom flower,
happy in the wasteland’’ (‘‘odorata ginestra / Contenta dei deserti,’’ ll. 6-7). The
landscape has become mineral: ‘‘Questi campi cosparsi / Di ceneri infeconde, e
ricoperti/ Dell’impietrata lava’’ (These slopes strewn with sterile ashes, sealed down
with lava turned hard as stone, ll. 17-19). But these mineral slopes give birth to a
vegetal sepulchral marker:
. . . Or tutto intorno
Una ruina involve,
Dove tu siedi, o fior gentile, e quasi
I danni altrui commiserando, al cielo
Di dolcissimo odor mandi un profumo
Che il deserta consola. (ll. 32-7)
(Now all around a ruin stretches where you sit, oh gentle flower, and almost as if you
were commiserating the sorrows of others, you send to the sky a perfume of the sweetest
scent which consoles the desert.)
The poet ironically summons to these burnt-out slopes anyone who believes that the
human race is in the care of ‘‘loving Nature.’’ Against the facile belief in progress,
Leopardi asks his foolish century ‘‘to mirror itself’’ in these blackened slopes. Leopardi
passionately exhorts humankind to unity and brotherhood in the common war against
nature. While we continue to arrogate to ourselves the boast of eternity, the humble
broom flower perfumes the air. Of course, the flower too will succumb to the killing
fires of Vesuvius, but it will do so without struggling, and without vain and cowardly
supplication before a future oppressor. The poet eulogizes the ginestra at the close of
the poem as wiser and stronger than humankind, who incorrectly considers itself
immortal. That there was a critical political message in all of Leopardi’s works was
certainly recognized: by 1836, the year before his death, the Austrian, Papal, Neapolitan, and Florentine governments had all prohibited the publication of the Operette
morali and the Canti.
Leopardi’s poetry, encompassing what critics have called his idyllic and his antiidyllic modes, does not present a uniform or static position. Philosophical meditation
and poetic remembrance may be the two poles of Leopardi’s expressive universe; yet
they are in a reciprocal and mutually constitutive relationship. Although one must
recognize the truth of the illusory nature of ideals and hopes, and of the search for
meaning in nature, one must first resuscitate these chimeras, experience their beauty
Margaret Brose
274
and their appeal, and then negate them. The poems are not merely mimetic of nature;
they constitute an interior landscape of emotions and pathos. It is the affective
movements of the human heart that are portrayed, even as Leopardi proclaims the
pure materiality of the world.
Notes
1 Silvio Pellico, Italian writer and patriot, was
best known for his memoir Le mie prigioni (My
Prisons) of 1832.
2 All citations from Foscolo’s poetry are from
Foscolo (1995).
3 Translations from Leopardi prose and poetry
are mine.
4 All citations from Leopardi’s works are from
Leopardi (1967). This edition comprises five
volumes: Le poesie e le prose, 2 vols.; Zibaldone, 2
vols.; Le lettere, 1 vol.
References and Further Reading
Primary sources
Foscolo, Ugo (1995). Opere, ed. Franco Gavazzeni.
Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore.
Foscolo, Ugo (1974). Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis.
Milan: Garzanti.
Foscolo, Ugo (2002). Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis and
Of Tombs, trans. J. G. Nichols. London: Hesperus Press.
Leopardi, Giacomo (1967). Tutte le opere di Giacomo
Leopardi, ed. Francesco Flora. Milan: Mondadori
Editori.
Leopardi, Giacomo (1992). Zibaldone. A Selection,
ed. and trans. Martha King and Daniela Bini.
New York: Peter Lang.
Secondary sources
Bigongiari, Piero (1976). Leopardi. Florence: La
Nuova Italia.
Bini, Daniela (1983). A Fragrance from the Desert:
Poetry and Philosophy in Giacomo Leopardi. Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri.
Binni, Walter (1973). La nuova poetica leopardiana.
Florence: Sansoni.
Brose, Margaret (1983). ‘‘Leopardi’s ‘L’Infinito’
and the Language of the Romantic Sublime.’’
Poetics Today, 4 (1): 47-71.
Brose, Margaret (1989). ‘‘The Politics of Mourning in Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri.’’ European Romantic
Review 9 (1): 1-34.
Brose, Margaret (1998). Leopardi sublime: la poetica
della temporalità. Bologna: Re Enzo.
Cambon, Glauco (1980). Ugo Foscolo, Poet of
Exile. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Carsaniga, Giovanni (1977). Leopardi: The Unheeded Voice. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Casale, Ottavio Mark (ed. and trans.) (1981).
A Leopardi Reader. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Damiani, Rolando (1998). All’apparir del vero. Vita
di Giacomo Leopardi. Milan: Mondadori.
Flores, Angel (ed.) (1966). Leopardi: Poems and
Prose. Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press.
Fubini, Mario (1978). Ugo Foscolo: saggi, studi, note.
Florence: La nuova Italia.
Kroeber, Karl (1964). The Artifice of Reality:
Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and
Leopardi. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Leopardi, Giacomo (1982). Operette morali: Essays
and Dialogues, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi
Maaz, Bernhard (ed.) (2001). Alte Nationalgalerie
Berlin: Museum Guide. Munich, London, and
New York: Prestel.
Manacorda, Giorgio (1973). Materialismo e Masochismo: il ‘‘Werther,’’ Foscolo e Leopardi. Florence:
La Nuova Italia.
Matteo, Sante (1985). Textual Exile: The Reader in
Sterne and Foscolo. New York: P. Lang.
O’Neill, Tom (1981). Of Virgin Muses and of Love:
A Study of Foscolo’s Dei sepolcrii. Dublin: Irish
Academic Press.
Origo, Iris (1935). Leopardi. A Study in Solitude.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
275
Perella, Nicholas James (1970). Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas (1970). Ugo Foscolo.
New York: Twayne.
Singh, G. (1964). Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry.
Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Whitfield, J. H. (1954). Giacomo Leopardi. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Wordsworth, William (1950). The Poetical Works,
ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press.
16
Spanish Romanticism
Derek Flitter
Spanish Romanticism has, self-reflexively throughout its own gestation and as mediated by successive generations of literary criticism, proved a form of cultural
production acutely susceptible to what Iris M. Zavala has designated ‘‘interpretaciones
antagónicas’’ (antagonistic interpretations), figuring in Spanish literary history beneath the sign of the paradox (Zavala 1994: 25). Contemporary overviews provide two
larger definitions. On the one hand, as a broad consensus position for the bulk of the
period between 1814 and the mid-century, there is the perception of a cohesive
movement founded upon medievalism, cultural nationalism, and Christian spirituality and directed towards the restoration of a characteristically Spanish collective
imagination against the unwarranted intrusions of a universalizing, rationalistic,
and neoclassical Enlightenment. Opposed to this is a critical reaction occurring
principally in the 1830s, one often of censure rather than of affirmation, that depicts
Romanticism as an anarchical and subversive literature profoundly questioning those
certainties upon which society had been traditionally based. Among the multifarious
assessments generated since, there may be numbered some equally conflictive formulations. First is an essentialist view of Romanticism as cultural phenomenon that
emphasizes the revival of typically Spanish imaginative practices inherited from the
country’s own medieval literature and its seventeenth-century Golden Age and a
concomitant protest against neoclassical formalism. Secondly, there is an approach
that seeks a metanarrative in the course of contemporary political events and underlines the significance, to the evolution of the movement, of the return to Spain in the
1830s of many of those writers exiled under the previous Absolutist order. Alternatively, we find a metaphysically orientated response that privileges that cluster of
important works perceived as articulating a form of religious skepticism or
cosmic rebellion. Emerging in the 1970s, meanwhile, came an identifiably
Marxist interpretation, in which the literary works are the expression of states of
mind commensurate with the conscious consolidation of a bourgeois revolution.
Other commentators have concentrated on the determining presence of cultural
Spanish Romanticism
277
coordinates at work interdependently in several related areas of intellectual history,
identifying an integrated and constructive pattern of predominantly conservative and
neo-Catholic thought at the nucleus of Spanish Romantic discourse. The reference list
offered here provides for all of these mutually contradictory explications of Romanticism in Spain. My narrative of events, while endeavoring to communicate to the
nonspecialist a thorough review of such divergent approaches, will at the same time
postulate my own latest thinking, rooted in an apprehension of the symbology
commonly found in the major creative works of the period.
The reception of Romantic aesthetics in Spain occurred in a relatively piecemeal
fashion between 1814 and 1834, something not exactly surprising given the abrupt
and occasionally violent changes marking the course of Spanish political history. The
historical prelude to that process was the Peninsular War. The progressive Cadiz
Constitution of 1812, debated at a time when that city, at the end of a long and
narrow causeway, had been the only part of the Spanish mainland not subject to
occupation by the French, had formalized aspirations towards representative freedoms
and constitutional liberty, most controversially enshrining in its codification the
sovereignty of the people. Such aspirations had been rapidly suppressed at the end
of hostilities in 1814 by a young king previously incarcerated in France, Ferdinand
VII, insistent upon a return to Absolutist forms of government. The ‘‘Cadiz liberals’’
as much as the pro-French intelligentsia (known as the afrancesados or ‘‘frenchified’’),
thus found themselves either exiled or imprisoned. An army-led rising in 1820 had
ushered in a further three-year experiment in constitutional democracy, abruptly
terminated by forces of the Holy Alliance. From 1823 until the death of Ferdinand
10 years later, Spain endured a period of trenchant Absolutism and political repression
labeled the ‘‘ominous decade,’’ exemplified by the policy of authoritarian control
regulated by Calomarde, notorious Minister of the Interior. It was perhaps inevitable,
within such a climate, that Romanticism should acquire a specifiable ideological
dimension, and almost equally as inevitable that, in the wake of both the Napoleonic
campaigns and the traditionalist tenor of Romantic theory as systematized in Germany, its entailments should come to be perceived as staunchly conservative.
Romanticism was, prior to 1833, a term generally understood as referring exclusively to that set of perspectives on literary history articulated by the brothers August
Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in their respective courses of lectures delivered in
Vienna between 1808 and 1812 and rapidly disseminated across Europe. Literary
works were classified as either ancient or modern, classical or Romantic, with other
accompanying dualistic coordinates firmly attached: pagan and Christian respectively
when it came to religious orientation, sensual and spiritual in terms of sentimental
expression, collective and individual as divergent primary emphases of purpose and
direction. Crucially in the Spanish case, a fundamental component of this pattern was
the revival of interest in and acclaim for the work of Pedro Calderón de la Barca
(1600-81), a dramatist viewed as comparable to Shakespeare and quintessential
imaginative mediator of a precious Christian and Romantic tradition unfairly maligned by an uncomprehending neo-Classicism. It was a patriotic stimulus reinforced
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by the Schlegels’ similarly positive reappraisal of Spain’s ballad tradition, discarded by
the Age of Reason as rude and imperfectly formed examples of popular superstition.
Add to this the notion that the neoclassical mindset that had spurned Calderón and
restored the prescriptive models of antiquity had come to be exemplified by a French
Enlightenment culture which, in enthroning human reason and scientific inquiry,
had more or less professed itself to be at best heterodox or, more likely, openly
atheistic – one has but to read Friedrich Schlegel’s own denunciation of Voltaire to be
acutely aware of this – and the result was, within the Spain of the immediate postwar
period, a righteous-minded affirmation of Romanticism as a salutary moral doctrine
as much as a set of aesthetic principles. It was viewed as such by the expatriate
German businessman and bibliophile who introduced Schlegelian theory to Spain,
Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber, whose campaign to reinstate Calderón in the face of
that dramatist’s ‘‘frenchified’’ and unpatriotic detractors was launched in Cadiz
itself in 1814. The set of attitudes obtaining in the 1820s are encapsulated in
words of José Joaquı́n de Mora, the German’s occasional sparring-partner in the
long-running literary dispute carried on in the Cadiz and Madrid press, who, writing
in the newspaper El Constitucional in 1820, affirmed that Liberalism was, within
the range of political opinions, the equivalent of classical taste in that of literary
ideas.
It was a formulation of ‘‘Romantic’’ that remained consistent and coherent, if
limited in scope, throughout the decade of the 1820s, in the pages of the shortlived but influential Barcelona journal El Europeo in 1823-4, and, more notably still,
in Agustı́n Durán’s defining pronouncements on the theater in his Discurso of 1828,
which made detailed and specific application of the ideas of those Durán designated
erudite German critics (Flitter 1992: 34-8). Bearing in mind this degree of systematization, it was next to impossible for Spanish critical opinion to comprehend the
phenomenon of a ‘‘Romantic’’ writer who derived inspiration from the classics:
Eugenio de Ochoa, in providing respective portraits of Classicist (designated by the
pejorative Spanish word clasiquista) and Romantic for the literary journal El Artista in
1835, would still cling to the basic dualistic principle, contrasting the necessarily
aged and decrepit Classicist who stuck to Aristotle and Boileau with the young and
sensitive Romantic whose heart was set aflame by the Christian Middle Ages, gothic
cathedrals, El Cid, and Calderón (Navas-Ruiz 1971: 129-31). Ultimately of far
greater import is that it would be a long time before Spanish critical opinion and
Spanish literary readers could countenance the idea that Romanticism might contain
profound religious questioning or articulate a despairing and pessimistic outlook on
life and the world. The Schlegelian Romantic doctrine – and ‘‘doctrina’’ was a word
commonly used, usually in the plural, to describe Romantic ideas during the period
in question – had become so broadly accepted and understood in the course of two
decades that Romantic radicalism, when it made its appearance in Spain, and
particularly on the Spanish stage under the influence of the new plays of Hugo and
Dumas, was regarded as an adulteration, an unwarranted distortion of the movement’s
true meaning. Joaquı́n Roca y Cornet, a militant neo-Catholic, was to observe that the
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279
fault lay not with the literary school but in the abuses to which it had been subjected
( Juretschke 1989: 56).
A new and more progressive approach to the ongoing literary debate was undoubtedly dynamized by the potential for significant political change after Ferdinand’s
death in 1833 and the renewed presence within the country of some of its liberal elder
statesmen and intellectual heavyweights. Much has been made of the contribution of
the returning political exiles to the literary and intellectual life of mid-1830s Spain,
as men like Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Francisco Martı́nez de la Rosa (at one and the
same time Prime Minister of Spain and author of the first genuinely Romantic drama
to be performed in Madrid) and Angel Saavedra, Duque de Rivas, all resumed active
roles in the public life of the country they had been forced to abandon under the
régime of Ferdinand VII. Alcalá Galiano would contribute the preface to Rivas’s 1834
narrative poem El moro expósito, a document that entirely eschewed ‘‘doctrinal’’
aesthetic positions, while Rivas’s 1835 play Don Álvaro, o la fuerza del sino, would
also, as we shall see, go some way towards breaking any perceived Romantic mold. A
tendency towards more eclectic and less formulaic thinking is exemplified by the
declaration of the influential journalist and political critic Mariano José de Larra in
1834 that the age itself demanded the profound spiritual questioning of a Byron or
Lamartine (Larra 1960, I: 274). Larra, like Alcalá Galiano, desired a framework of
literary ideas that would dispense with polarizing prescriptions such as the classical–
Romantic dichotomy and produce instead a modern and forward-looking literature
capable of engaging with contemporary problems in a bold and adventurous way
whatever its formal or stylistic content.
Larra’s own historical drama Macı́as, first performed on the Madrid stage in the
autumn of 1834 although written two years earlier, is demonstrably the practical
expression of its author’s conceptual and structural independence of spirit. The play,
while centering on the figure of the lovelorn eponymous troubadour customarily
assigned the epithet of ‘‘el enamorado’’ (the man in love) in Spanish literary history, is
clearly not intended to effect the diffuse poetic idealization of the Middle Ages that
was so commonly a feature of Romantic aesthetics and increasingly a pre-eminent
component part of creative literature. The Macı́as of Larra’s drama is figured instead as
a passionate lover who makes strident and insistent emotional demands entirely
inconsonant with the poetic mystique of a courtly love that thrives without the aid
of reciprocity. More than this, he incarnates an uncompromising form of social
rebellion, audacious and genuinely revolutionary in its intensity and scope, that
brooks no concessions to traditional morality and countenances no deviation from
its own unswerving purpose. Like so many of his Romantic counterparts, Macı́as is
definitively separated from his beloved Elvira on earth due to the selfish and cynical
intriguing of others. What differentiates Larra’s play is not so much its lack of a
posited metaphysical solution so much as its robust discarding of any traditional
discourse of the sacred and transcendent. Unpersuaded of the sufficiency of any
putative eventual reward – reunion with Elvira in eternal life – Macı́as explicitly
forswears the validity of her nuptial obligations to another man, the self-serving
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Fernán Pérez; he then articulates a hugely energetic and forceful vision of love as the
only valid life-principle that owes much to Rousseau in its figuration of natural law
and at the same time reinforces his characterization as dauntless but inexorably
doomed social rebel.
In terms of its stagecraft, too, Macı́as breaks with the parameters of Romantic
theater as envisaged by the theorists. It is the only play commonly allocated a place
within the canon of Spanish Romantic drama to observe quite rigorously the unities
of time, place, and action: the plot encompasses a single day of January, 1406,
beginning at dawn and closing at dusk; all of its scenes are enacted within the
confines of the castle of Enrique de Villena, Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava;
and dramatic interest focuses relentlessly upon the struggles of Macı́as himself against
a social and moral order that inevitably destroys him. It is noteworthy also that in its
settings the play invests little in the forms of metaphorical transposition that were to
become such a hallmark of Romantic dramaturgy, the location of the action so often
no more than the expression of evident corollaries of place and mood. In Larra’s play,
the emphasis is on more elusive but arguably more potent forms of symbolic
suggestion, in the narrowly obsessive range of the protagonist’s view of his own
situation and in the various analogues of restriction and confinement to be found in
his physical imprisonment and social marginalization.
In the crucial years between 1834 and 1837, it was to be the theater, and especially
the Madrid stage, that was to be the crucible of aesthetic, ideological, and spiritual
controversy. Indeed it would not be unfair to suggest that the fortunes and future
direction of Spanish Romanticism were definitively resolved by the reception and
interpretation of a handful of key texts, some original creations and others translations
of the French dramas of Hugo and Dumas. What is increasingly plain is that
concerted critical positioning as much as audience reaction seems to have exerted a
determining effect.
The Spanish Romantic play which, more than any other, and almost since the time
of its first performance in March 1835, has customarily been taken to embody the
spirit of rebellion – both formal, in its dramatic structure, and metaphysical, in its
despairing outlook – is the Duque de Rivas’s Don Álvaro, o la fuerza del sino. The hero,
son of a Spanish viceroy and an Inca princess, is widely admired in eighteenth-century
Seville both for his personal qualities and for his glamorous accomplishments in areas
such as bullfighting and swordplay; he is in love with and loved by Leonor, daughter
of the Marqués de Calatrava, but his uncertain origins debar him as a respectable
suitor. He believes that his sino or predestination to suffering thwarts him at every
step. Surprised by Leonor’s father when the couple are about to elope, Álvaro throws
to the ground his pistol only for it to fire and mortally wound the Marqués. Fighting
with the Spanish armies in Italy under an assumed name, he saves the life of Don
Carlos, brother to Leonor, who has gone to Italy to track down his father’s killer; when
Carlos discovers Álvaro’s true identity he insists upon a duel in which Álvaro
unwillingly fights and kills his opponent. Álvaro then becomes a monk, only to be
located by a second brother, Alfonso, whom Álvaro likewise reluctantly engages and
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281
fatally wounds in single combat. The hermit summoned from a nearby cave to
administer the last rites to the dying Alfonso turns out to be none other than Leonor
herself; Alfonso, in his final moments, kills his sister in cold blood, believing her still
to be guilty of sinful love, while Álvaro, utterly desperate, hurls himself to his death
from a crag in the midst of a terrific storm. The hair-raising finale, it should be noted,
is heavily mitigated in this drama’s more familiar form of Verdi’s opera, where Álvaro
simply exclaims ‘‘Morta!’’ at Leonora’s death, the Guardiano seemingly correcting him
with the phrase ‘‘Salita a Dio’’ (Gone on to God) before the curtain falls, and where
Leonora’s earlier words reprise those of Ravenswood in Lucia di Lammermoor in their
anticipation of an uncomplicated heavenly reunion: ‘‘Lieta or poss’io precederti / alla
promessa terra. La cesserà la guerra, / santo l’amor sarà’ (I can happily go before you to
that promised land, where warfare shall be at an end and love shall be ever holy).
Two moments in particular provide potent textual markers for the play’s alleged
cosmic rebellion: Álvaro’s tremendous protest against God in Act III, scene iii, where
he figures himself as a prisoner constantly tormented in life by a malignant jailer-God
who delights in the suffering inflicted upon his hapless victim; and the climactic final
scene, in which he figures himself as an anti-Christ, an emissary from Hell. Little
wonder, then, that the play’s protagonist has come to be seen as the archetype of the
Romantic Revolution, an emblem of protest against a social order that has marginalized him and a supernatural order that has relentlessly and mercilessly persecuted
him. Don Álvaro rapidly came to be viewed as the most dangerously nihilistic product
of the Spanish Romantic stage, the vehicle for a despairing personal philosophy that
ruled out any possibility of religious consolation.
While Don Álvaro initially bewildered audiences unprepared for the audacity of its
stagecraft and the intensity of its expression, much greater popular success was
achieved by a young Spanish playwright with a drama that was his first to be staged:
El trovador, by Antonio Garcı́a Gutiérrez, is far better known for its adaptation to
Italian grand opera, but its favorable reception from the time of its première in March
1836 was unparalleled in Spanish Romantic theater. Manrique, the eponymous
troubadour, is represented, unlike Larra’s Macı́as, with all of the mystique reserved
in the Romantic mind for the medieval chivalric lover, the lute upon which he
accompanies his own songs being an inseparable component of his dramatic persona.
Even more so than his predecessor, however, Manrique makes implacable emotional
demands upon his lover Leonor, urging and eventually persuading her to break her
religious vows and flee with him from the convent where she has sought refuge.
Believing herself to be irreparably damned for this action, she takes poison as a
deliberate stratagem to bring about his later release from prison, promising herself in
return to the rival suitor who has imprisoned the troubadour. This man, Nuño, has no
intention of keeping his own side of the bargain, however, and has Manrique
executed. Only as the axe falls is the troubadour’s real identity finally disclosed:
Manrique is brother to Nuño, snatched from his cradle by the gipsy woman Azucena
and brought up as her own son; with Manrique’s death Azucena’s mother, burned at
the stake as a witch on the orders of Nuño’s father, is finally avenged.
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Last in the triumvirate of plays generally seen as the foremost contributions to
original Spanish drama of this turbulent period is Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch’s Los
amantes de Teruel, a work based upon one of medieval Spain’s best-known legends. The
story of Diego Marsilla and Isabel Segura has much in common with that invented by
Walter Scott for Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor, and
even more so with Donizetti’s operatic version, Lucia di Lammermoor, premièred in
Naples in 1835. Marsilla is born into a family of impeccable pedigree that has fallen
upon hard times; in order to win the hand of Isabel, he is given six years to make his
fortune. In his absence, Isabel is falsely told of his desertion and death and, in order to
protect the reputation of her mother, threatened with the release of compromising
letters, she agrees to marry the blackmailer, Rodrigo Azagra. When Azagra desists,
Isabel nonetheless goes through with the wedding, feeling herself bereft after what she
believes to be the loss of Marsilla; he, however, returns to Teruel to claim her, just
minutes too late to prevent the ceremony. Marsilla, unable to accept that Isabel is
definitively bound to another, dies on stage of a broken heart, while Isabel swiftly
follows him in the play’s final moments.
In all of these plays a decisive dramatic feature, it is often claimed, is the profound
connection between love and death, one that posits love as the true existential
principle and which, when that love is doomed, consigns the lovers to necessary
despair and destruction. Nevertheless, the shared symbological framework of these
plays might be seen to lead us in a markedly different direction. For example, nothing
definitively discounts an interpretation of Rivas’s play as a dramatization of the
consequences, albeit disproportionate in their catastrophic effect, of a specifiable
weakness or moral deficiency on the part of its protagonist. Rivas was, for the first
15 years of his writing career, an author of neoclassical tastes, and not without reason
have critics drawn attention to the Aristotelian entailments of this play. The force of
destiny of the title may function as an allusion, as then exemplified by the action, to
the psychological disposition of a given individual to believe in astrology, in the
predestination of human lives by the stars, and thus to ascribe the reverses of fortune
habitually suffered in the course of an individual life to an agency of fate outside the
control of the human will rather than to any human frailty, whatever the degree to
which personal choice has informed a given outcome. One of the literary discourses
most acutely possessed of symbolic content and resonance, a discourse that relies upon
the efficacy of symbolic loading to project a desired immediacy and for which the
phenomenological distance that inevitably accompanies metaphysical abstraction is a
particular danger, is the eschatological discourse of Revelation. Clandestinely entering
the Calatrava family mansion, Álvaro asks whether the sacred heavens are at last to
reward his trials with an eternal crown (Rivas 1994: 96), foreseeing eternal happiness
thanks to the beneficent intervention of a providential God. What he in effect does, in
characteristically Romantic fashion, is to effect a transposition of the language of
eschatology out of the discourse of religion and into that of love. He attributes to love
a dimension not just habitually corresponding to religious discourse but also customarily reserved, within that discourse, for Last Things; what Don Álvaro designates a
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‘‘corona eterna’’ is a crown of human love bestowed upon him by marriage with
Leonor, a sacralization of Romantic passion, whereas in Revelation the crown is gained
as recompense for enduring with unswerving faith the tribulations of this world
(Revelation 2: 10). Don Álvaro perceives a final judgment to result either in the
attainment of Romantic love in its reciprocity (salvation) or else in its lack (damnation). When, in Act IV, he reaches the point of lamenting his having ever known
Leonor, his ‘‘-Hora de maldición, aciaga hora!’’ (What accursed day, what bitter hour!;
Rivas 1994: 164) inevitably calls to mind the penitential text of the Dies irae, dies illa
that foresees the terrors of the hour of Apocalypse, reinforcing the rhetorical connection between Don Álvaro’s professed love for Leonor and his eventual death.
Even the death of the Marqués may be read in this light. Álvaro has previously
charged and cocked his gun, so that we are not dealing unequivocally with a tragic
accident but an unforeseen consequence of an act of free will. Álvaro’s later metaphorization of life in the world and its vicissitudes as a preordained imprisonment is also
present in the mystic discourse of the monk of Patmos, but now Álvaro, prisoner to
the belief that he is ill-starred and persecuted, leads us to imagine a lifelong sentence
from which a merciless guardian will countenance no release. Unable to bear his pain,
his period of trial, with Christian resignation, Don Álvaro protests against a malign
God who treats him as a mere plaything. Leonor’s reaction to the tragedy is very
different. She reaches the Convento de los Ángeles as a place of ultimate refuge,
professing remorse and a desire to atone for her previous conduct. Leonor’s language
reveals a profound piety, irresistibly calling to mind the informing paradigm of Job.
In her dialogue with the Padre Guardián in Act II, Scene vii, he assures her that all the
tribulations of this passing world are fleeting and always end in release (Rivas 1994:
119-20).
In the profound questioning of Don Álvaro, there are glimpses of the ultimate
consequences of rebellion against this system on the part of humanity. The only
remedy left to Don Álvaro, sunk in despair, is suicide, enacted as one final theatrical
gesture in which he curses the whole of the created world and calls down its
apocalyptic destruction. The choir of monks, meanwhile, implores divine mercy to
the accompaniment of the offstage chanting of the Miserere. This last, the penitential
Psalm 51, articulates utter human dependency upon God and an acknowledgement on
the part of the individual sinner that the only response to suffering is to trust in the
deity’s ultimate goodness. What alternative was left to a generation like that of the
Duque de Rivas, seemingly born to instability and prone to disaster in an age
increasingly imprinted with the erosion of faith, and experiencing social, political,
and metaphysical turmoil? What was one to do if one was not persuaded that
historical events responded to a providential plan, to an ultimately beneficent and
meaningful divinely ordained pattern? The answer, in the Spanish context, was
memorably enunciated in Larra’s much quoted review of Dumas’s Antony: this play,
he wrote, was the cry uttered by the forefront of humanity, a cry of despair upon
finding only chaos and nothingness at the end of its journey (Larra 1960, II: 247).
This is the cry voiced by Don Álvaro in Rivas’s drama of the previous year: ‘‘¡Húndase
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el cielo! ¡Perezca la raza humana! ¡Exterminio! ¡Destrucción!’’ (Let the heavens
collapse! Let the human race perish! Extermination! Destruction!; Rivas 1994:
189). He heralds Armageddon, figuring himself as the beast that emerges from the
pit at the end of all things. After the first Spanish performance of Antony, Don Álvaro
itself became the object of increasingly negative criticism; Enrique Gil y Carrasco, for
example, made reference to the play’s despairing and skeptical philosophy, asserting
that it lacked any constructive social purpose (Gil y Carrasco 1954: 479). What is not
in dispute is that Don Álvaro provides us with a terrifying intimation of the moral
incoherence of the world as it comes to be conceived by the play’s protagonist.
Nonetheless, the eschatological components present in the symbolic framework
allow us at least to suspect that the work was conceived as a cautionary drama,
counseling against the promptings of despair, and that its spectacular theatricality
was calculated to intensify both the effectiveness and the immediacy of its warning;
this, after all, is how Rivas’s close friend Alcalá Galiano saw it and explained it at the
time of its first performance.
A similar symbolic framework dominates the important monologue of Isabel
Segura in Act V of Hartzenbusch’s play. While Marsilla has attributed his unhappiness to divine malevolence in lines that more or less precisely recreate the furious
protest of Rivas’s Don Álvaro, Isabel enters into a compassionate inner dialogue with a
merciful God, her rhetoric belonging unquestionably to the discourse of Christian
Stoicism: ‘‘fenecido/ el tiempo de prueba/[ . . . ] nos luce la aurora/de la recompensa’’
(our time of trial now ended, there dawns the light of our reward; Hartzenbusch
1971: 142). The speech contains a veritable roll-call of the salient components of
Stoicism as applied to the Christian faith: suffering in life as a trial, a period of
tribulation that may be overcome by faith so that the soul attains its divine reward. In
the case of Hartzenbusch’s play, it is hardly surprising that a thirteenth-century
woman of gentle birth should reveal an intimate reliance on religious faith at such
a critical moment in her life. On an historical plane, meanwhile, it was the conscious
application of just such a philosophy which, according to the Enlightenment-entailed
emphases of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism, had enabled the Catholic church
to perpetuate the moral enslavement of the people. We ought not to forget that
Rivas’s play has as its historical setting the middle of the eighteenth century, the
historical moment of the preparation of the great Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert.
Perhaps unexpectedly so, it is in El trovador that the transposition of key symbols
from the discourse of eschatology into that of human love reaches its furthest
consequences. Act III, scene iv, in which the stage set irresistibly suggests a religious
painting with Leonor at the prayer-desk in her simple convent cell, sees the heroine
explicitly renounce her role as bride of Christ in favor of her love for the troubadour
Manrique, confessing the falseness of her religious vows and their displacement; her
mind, she says in this crucial monologue, ‘‘se extasiaba/ en la imagen de un mortal’’
(found ecstasy in the image of a mortal man; Garcı́a Gutiérrez 1997: 150). Manrique,
on his arrival, insists that Leonor had been unfaithful to him rather than to God,
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using the emphatic adjective ‘‘perjura,’’ and, at the end of a tense dialogue, Leonor
abandons herself to this Romantic passion in the full realization of its ultimate
consequences. Recreating the same metaphor used by Don Álvaro immediately
prior to his suicide, she protests: ‘‘mira el abismo/bajo mis pies abierto; no pretendas/
precipitarme en él’’ (look at the abyss that lies open beneath my feet; do not strive to
hurl me into it; Garcı́a Gutiérrez 1997: 155). While, in Act IV, scene v, Leonor
professes a definitive view of this perspective on recognizing that her bond with
Manrique is a ‘‘nudo de maldición que allá en su trono/enojado maldice un Dios
terrible’’ (accursed bond for which yonder, on His throne, a terrible God will curse us;
Garcı́a Gutiérrez 1997: 167). This sacrilization of human love is best emblematized,
meanwhile, in Act V, scene vii, in Manrique’s lament for Leonor’s death, its iconography unmistakable as the troubadour asks for a crown of flowers to place on her brow:
‘‘será aureola luciente, / será diadema de amores’’ (it shall be a gleaming halo, a diadem
of love; Garcı́a Gutiérrez 1997: 195). Manrique invests the dead Leonor with the
visual characteristics of an image of the Blessed Virgin, in what is possibly the pivotal
moment in Spanish Romantic theatre.
Yet, unfortunately as far as the possible realization of Larra’s vision of a new
literature was concerned, his consistent demands for a fresh kind of writing coincided
with the appearance within Spain of the French Romantic drama of Hugo and Dumas.
The plays of Dumas in particular had been briefed against even before their first
Spanish staging, and by figures as commanding of respect as the Catholic priest and
political moderate Alberto Lista. Early in 1834 Lista had launched a furious attack
upon the French dramatists, in which he distinguished between two distinct Romantic currents: on the one hand, Schlegelian historical Romanticism, with its reassuring
medieval and Christian associations; on the other, a newly emergent ‘‘monstrous’’
literature: dramatic spectacle reduced to a series of unconnected sketches, moral
decency trodden underfoot in descriptions of adulterous love and wickedness which
the author attempted by all means to make interesting; frenzied language; in short,
the natural order of things entirely unhinged. That, according to Lista, was what was
now being called Romanticism (Flitter 1992: 77-8). As far as Antony was concerned,
Larra himself would go a long way towards concurring in Lista’s judgment; aghast at
the spectacle of social disorder personified in Antony, in both literary and philosophical terms, he shuddered at the ‘‘great immorality’’ of a piece that possessed too many
morbid attractions (Larra 1960, II: 248).
We should not find it surprising that the vogue of a new and radical brand of
Romanticism was short-lived, particularly in the theater, where the emphasis swiftly
came to be upon the adaptation of Spain’s existing Golden-Age themes and situations
to the demands of the nineteenth-century stage; and negative judgments of Romantic
radicalism usually ascribed ‘‘subversive’’ tendencies to the nefarious inspiration of
France. As David Gies has pointedly reminded us in summing up the conflicts,
literary and otherwise, of the 1830s, it was no longer a question to be decided
between neo-Classicism and Romanticism but of one between ‘‘el romanticismo
benévolo’’ (a benevolent Romanticism) and a profoundly different ‘‘romanticismo
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exagerado, degradado, execrado’’ (exaggerated, degraded, execrated Romanticism;
Gies 1989: 15). Leonardo Romero Tobar has likewise drawn attention to the rejection
of ‘‘la tendencia fatalista’’ (the fatalistic tendency) detected in French Romanticism by
a range of critics – Lista, Juan Donoso Cortés, José Marı́a Quadrado, and others – who
nevertheless adopted the essential postulates of Schlegelian historical Romanticism
(Romero Tobar 1994: 34). So far as Spanish Romanticism had an ideology, as I have
painstakingly sought to show elsewhere (Flitter 1992, 2000), it was a traditionalist,
restorative, and Catholic ideology. The neo-Catholic philosopher and theologian
Jaime Balmes is a case in point: commenting on his 1842 essay ‘‘De la originalidad,’’
Hans Juretschke states that the piece reproduces in its essence the entire Romantic
aesthetic; as he concludes: ‘‘En su credo estético, Balmes es romántico’’ (In his
aesthetic credo, Balmes is a Romantic; Juretschke 1989: 194).
So what are we to make of the critical commonplace that the returning political
exiles brought Romanticism to Spain as part of their baggage? This last metaphor, it
should be noted, was employed by Frederick Courtney Tarr as long ago as 1939 in his
argument against just such a supposition; the idea has, however, continued to enjoy
common currency thanks to the longevity of the assumption, most memorably voiced
by Victor Hugo, that ‘‘true’’ Romanticism is by definition liberal and/or revolutionary. Critics favoring this definition, and especially those identified by Philip Silver
(1997) as engaging in a transferential or politically committed narrative of the period,
have then been able to emplot their respective accounts as romance. Within this
scenario, those liberals forced into exile during the ‘‘ominous decade’’ of Absolutist
rule return from more enlightened climes with a bright new literary and political
vision to restore hope to a sadly benighted nation. Hence even an account as recent as
that of Diego Martı́nez Torrón is founded upon a transparent metanarrative or
‘‘magnı́fica novela’’ (magnificent novel; Martı́nez Torrón 1993). Its application involves of course a calculated downplaying of the role of those literary men responsible
for the introduction into Spain of German theories of Romanticism in the 1820s.
These writers are customarily either vilified or excluded: Vicente Llorens’ captious
treatment of Böhl, for whom, he states, the Holy Inquisition would have seemed
dangerously subversive, is a case in point (Llorens 1979: 354).
The future direction of Romanticism in Spain, by any objective criteria, was to
depend more upon the reception, albeit in a changed intellectual climate, of new
philosophical and aesthetic prescriptions by those Spanish writers who had either
continued to reside in Spain during the ‘‘ominous decade’’ or else who had been too
young actively to participate in or even to remember the events of the Peninsular War
or the earlier constitutional parliament of 1820-3. Ultimately, the case for a new and
definitive orientation of Spanish Romanticism provided by the returning exiled
liberals rests upon the transforming impact of the plays by Martı́nez de la Rosa and
the Duque de Rivas, premièred respectively in 1834 and 1835; of the poetry of José de
Espronceda; and, in terms of ideas, of Alcalá Galiano’s prologue to El moro expósito.
Concerning the theater, Ermanno Caldera and David Gies have cautioned against any
notion of an abrupt change in dramatic practice fueled by the French experience.
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Caldera argues that Romanticism was not for Spain merely an injection of foreign
motifs, or at least that such foreign-inspired features were no more than a catalyst
which had energized a process initiated some time before (Caldera 1988: 450). Gies,
approvingly citing this passage, sums up by stating that ‘‘Romantic drama in Spain
remains incomprehensible if we ignore its immediate indigenous history’’ (Gies 1994:
97). It might be added that neither Martı́nez de la Rosa nor Rivas wrote anything of
the kind again, that Don Álvaro aroused principally bewilderment and was not
frequently performed, and that the French Romantic drama that is often taken to
have inspired the two plays, a form of drama lambasted by Lista before any such works
had appeared on the Spanish stage, was virulently rejected by a large body of critical
opinion and its vogue short-lived. In contrast, native-inspired Romantic drama in the
hands of Hartzenbusch, José Zorrilla, Antonio Gil y Zárate, and others proved
popular and successful with critics and audiences alike well into the 1840s. In poetry,
the tide too turned against lurid excess in favor of the kind of restorative, nationalistic
verse exemplified by Zorrilla (Flitter 1993); in literary criticism, Alcalá Galiano’s
position gained little currency, never achieving anything approaching the status and
influence of Durán’s much earlier Discurso, a work that, if we pay attention to period
preferences and literary orientation, might much more aptly be regarded as the
definitive manifesto of Spanish Romanticism. Alonso Seoane recapitulates in the
following way: although there is room for considerable nuancing, what was a passing
phase was the defining impact of a radical Romanticism containing a worldview of
religious skepticism; it was the earlier Schlegelian model that came to be considered
‘‘único y auténtico ‘romanticismo’ ’’ (the only authentic Romanticism; Alonso Seoane
1993: 75-6).
After Larra’s death in February 1837, Romantic radicalism was associated most
potently with the poetry of Espronceda, who has always been closely linked with
Byron. For Enrique Piñeyro, an early historian of Spanish Romanticism, Espronceda’s
poetry of combative protest went to the very heart of the new art in its unrelenting
and eloquent struggle against both the privations and the violent reactions of its age
(Churchman 1909: 17). Espronceda’s ‘‘Canción del pirata’’ irresistibly reminds us of
Byron’s corsair, and generally embodies Churchman’s description of Byronic heroes as
men freed from all law, human or divine, as noble rebels who ‘‘personify anarchic
individualism, unchained natural forces’’ (Churchman 1909: 60). Not just in its
narrative extent, however, but also in the sheer ferocity of its lyricism and in the
strength of its air of existential rebellion, it is El estudiante de Salamanca that, amongst
Espronceda’s works, comes closest of all to recreating Byronic protest. The student
himself, Félix de Montemar, undoubtedly possesses the requisite frisson of evil and
there is too the suggestion of his having committed some mysterious heinous crime.
As Cardwell shrewdly notes, however, Montemar’s violent death is all the more
striking inasmuch as a common theme of Espronceda’s sources had been renunciation
of a life of debauchery and sin for one of penitence and contrition; all of those stories
upon which the poem is founded are moral in tone and designed to warn and edify
(Cardwell 1991: 12). The blackguard student who nonchalantly fights duels and
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heartlessly seduces and abandons women, seemingly destined for final repentance if
the source texts are to be respected, in Espronceda’s radical rewriting refuses to the last
to renounce his titanic activity, something which locates him with Faust, Manfred, or
Cain rather than with his Spanish antecedents (Cardwell 1991: 13, 17).
This lack of a shaping religious context means that Espronceda’s political rebellion
is in essence a metaphysical revolt. He writes against the arguments of Christian
revelation and moral example ‘‘not by refuting them but by turning them inside out
or inverting them. He is working against the ideologies (and the authority invested in
those ideologies) of Christian teaching and Catholic society whose structures are
rooted in revealed religion and moral precept’’ (Cardwell 1988; Cardwell 1991: 27).
Within such a frame, Montemar’s death is underwritten by none of the eschatology of
the Counter-Reformation, it contains no charge of mortal sin and the lack of spiritual
preparedness, no assertion of purgation and ultimate justice, no presupposition of an
ultimately benevolent God. In the face of loss of faith, we cannot but assert our
rebellious individuality, and henceforth move from passive acceptance to active revolt
(Cardwell 1991: 27-8). This places Espronceda’s poem at a significant remove even
from some of those more contentious examples of original Spanish Romantic drama.
The lack of concerted critical outrage at what must have been the acutely apparent
nihilism of El estudiante de Salamanca can be explained by a number of significant
factors. First, the narrative description of the poem, its settings, could very evidently
have been read as the product of the poetic sublime as long practiced and understood
in Spain. Secondly, it was transparently the case that, whatever the force of its
radically altered ending, Espronceda’s text was manifestly using recognizable Spanish
sources: almost all charges of unwarrantable radicalism leveled against Romantic texts
presupposed the unwary imitation, by a Spanish writer, of a foreign original (Don
Álvaro, for example, had been conceived and drafted during its author’s political exile
in France). Thirdly, in a society that was very predominantly devout, Montemar’s
death might appear as merely the justifiable retribution meted out to a notorious
wrongdoer: most Spanish literary readers would surely have recalled the employment
by Calderón of a skeleton clothed as a mysterious and promisingly attractive woman
in El mágico prodigioso, complete with the textually explicit moral that all the pleasures
of this mortal world are transient. We might add that the elusiveness of its temporal
setting and its capa y espada, or cloak and dagger, features would almost certainly have
placed the events of the poem at a reassuring phenomenological distance, stripping it
of the potency of contemporary immediacy, which is what seems to have been most
feared of all. The recreation of a legendary story rooted in past tradition was never
likely to shock Spanish susceptibilities as profoundly as an Antony.
Nevertheless, by the time Espronceda’s close friend Enrique Gil y Carrasco came to
review his collected volume of poetry in the weekly Semanario Pintoresco Español in
1840, times had changed incalculably from the last years of the 1820s. What could be
figured as sublimely passionate and mysterious had, a decade later, assumed a far more
threatening outlook: boundless doubt, uncertainty, and sorrow had clouded the
mirror of the soul, resulting in violent inner conflict and upheaval. Out of all this
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stemmed the vacillating, ill-defined, and, to a degree, contradictory nature of contemporary imaginative writing; the ‘‘religious sadness’’ of Milton and Luis de León
had been replaced by the ‘‘inconsolable skepticism’’ of Childe Harold and the frenzied,
permanently unsatisfied passion of Chateaubriand’s René (Navas-Ruiz 1971: 226-7).
Gil looked at Espronceda’s Ossianic poem ‘‘Oscar y Malvina’’ and saw an admirable
recreation of the dreamlike impassioned melancholy that underpinned the work of the
Celtic bard (Navas-Ruiz 1971: 229). The ‘‘Canciones’’ inevitably fare less well: the
Spanish poet’s hangman and condemned criminal belonged, as Gil expressed it, to the
bitter, sardonic, and disconsolate school of Byron; they were products of a sorrowful
and solitary muse that despised all consolation and wallowed in its own suffering
(Navas-Ruiz 1971: 233). ‘‘A Jarifa’’ he regards as a quintessential example of a
skeptical and macabre verse, bereft of faith, stripped of all hope but rich in disillusion
and sorrow, verse that rends the heart asunder rather than move it to feeling (NavasRuiz 1971: 237).
It is both illuminating and instructive to counterpoint some of this surprisingly
sharp critique – Enrique Gil was a dear friend of Espronceda and would give an
emotional address at the latter’s graveside in 1842 – with the approbation that Gil
had accorded in the previous year to the early poetry of Zorrilla. Although drawing
attention to what he regarded as significant defects of style and construction, Enrique
Gil lauded the ‘‘philosophical intention’’ of the young Zorrilla, which he summarized
as the aim of raising up and rejuvenating Spain’s poetic nationhood, of plucking
traditions out of the dust, and of restoring, to all possible degree, that elevated
knightly spirit which the nation had lost together with the glories that sustained it
but whose seed still rested in sensitive hearts (Navas-Ruiz 1971: 224).
Zorrilla, who acquired celebrity overnight after reading out one of his earliest
compositions at Larra’s graveside to an enthralled audience of the literary men of the
day, readily committed himself to this emotional and reassuring appeal to national
traditions (Flitter 1993), which represented the best if not only real guarantor of
public success, something that most certainly did not reside in any air of doubt and
mocking speculation. Nicomedes-Pastor Dı́az’s words in prefacing Zorrilla’s first
published volume of poetry are intimately revealing of the imprint that the latter’s
work rapidly acquired. His poems, wrote Dı́az, captured a medieval grandeur lost to
the present age, and effectively contrasted the cold, ignoble, and ridiculous qualities
of the present era with the magnificence, solemnity, and sublimity inherent in
recollections of the age of religion and chivalry (Dı́az 1969, I: 112). In the preface
to his second volume of poems, published in 1838, we find Zorrilla’s own celebrated
proclamation of ‘‘la patria en que nacı́ y la religión en que vivo. Español, he buscado en
nuestro suelo mis inspiraciones. Cristiano, he creı́do que mi religión encierra más
poesı́a que el paganismo’’ (the country into which I was born and the religion that
I live and breathe. As a Spaniard, I have sought my inspiration in our own soil. As a
Christian, I have always believed my own religion to contain more poetry than
paganism; Alonso Cortés 1943: 204). Summoned to the stage after the first performance of his early play Cada cual con su razón, Zorrilla would make his oft-quoted
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scathing reference to the ‘‘monstruosos abortos de la elegante corte de Francia’’
(monstrous abortions of the elegant French court) and declare his preference for
models nearer to the native Spanish tradition than to Hernani or Lucrezia Borgia
(Zorrilla 1943, II: 2207). Finally, the verse prologue to his Cantos del trovador of 1840-1
professed: ‘‘Lejos de mı́ la historia tentadora / de ajena tierra y religión profana. / Mi
voz, mi corazón, mi fantası́a, / la gloria cantan de la patria mı́a’’ (Away, away, alluring
tales of strange realms and pagan faith. My voice, my heart and my poetic fantasy shall
sing the glories of my own land; Alonso Cortés 1943: 258). The imaginative vision of
Zorrilla’s verse narratives and historical dramas, like the comparable literary creations
of so many of his contemporaries, tallies with the Romantic prescriptions of the
broader medieval revival, while his Don Juan Tenorio exemplifies Spain’s fundamentally conservative Romanticism in its sources, traditions, outlook, and conceptual
pattern.
Zorrilla’s Romantic version of the story of Don Juan, brought to the stage in 1844,
sets the seal upon the trajectory of Spanish Romanticism away from radical questioning and towards essential processes of reassurance. Unlike his predecessors, Zorrilla
has the notorious seducer redeemed and saved by the love of the innocent and virtuous
Doña Inés, in some of the most famous scenes in the history of the Spanish stage.
There is a parallel with some of the earlier texts, particularly with Don Álvaro, in
Zorrilla’s development of the idea of personal responsibility. In the first part of the
play, Don Juan reacts in the face of provocation and kills both his principal adversary
and the father of the woman he wishes to marry, the latter in cold blood, unable to
maintain the new-found goodness and humility that have been inspired in him by
Romantic love for Doña Inés. He first attempts to justify his actions, declaiming
‘‘Llamé al cielo y no me oyó’’ (I called out to Heaven and Heaven did not hear me).
When Don Juan then seeks to blame God for his actions in professing ‘‘de mis pasos
en la tierra / responda el cielo y no yo’’ (let Heaven, not I, answer for my steps on
earth; Zorrilla 1988: 179), it is hard not to think of a connection between Zorrilla’s
play and the earlier one by Rivas; a common factor here lies in their protagonists’
refusal to take responsibility for the results of their actions. In Act IV of Rivas’s drama
Don Álvaro reiterates the point in referring to ‘‘la desgracia inevitable de que no fui yo
culpable’’ (the inevitable tragedy for which I was not responsible; Rivas 1994: 152).
In order for the deus ex machina resolution of Zorrilla’s play to function (the spirit of
the dead Inés appears at the very last moment, so that Don Juan can repent when one
last grain of sand is left in the hourglass that represents his life draining away, and as
the statue of the dead Comendador famously takes him by the hand to lead him to
Hell), it is indispensable that Don Juan first admit personal responsibility: hence
when he returns to Seville five years later in the second part of the play and sees the
funerary statue of Inés he rebukes himself with the words ‘‘por mi mal no respira’’ (on
account of my wickedness she breathes no more; Zorrilla 1988: 191). The uncomplicated metaphysical sublimation of love is figured at the very end of Zorrilla’s drama,
albeit in the most mawkish terms, in a way that is reminiscent of Wagner’s The Flying
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Dutchman of the previous year, in a process of transfiguration in the sky: Inés redeems
Juan just as Senta redeems the Dutchman.
As Jean-Louis Picoche has averred, the salient constant features of Spanish Romanticism were thus its supernatural emphasis and its dynamically intense patriotism
(Picoche 1978: 156). Indeed, across an enormously wide area of intellectual enquiry,
historical Romanticism as first formulated in Germany enjoyed almost unchallenged
pre-eminence in the Spain of the first half of the nineteenth century (Herrero 1978:
354). Philip Silver inclines even to extend the mandate into the second half of the
century, tracing the dissemination of a conservative literary Romanticism as ‘‘a
nationalistic politico-literary ideology throughout the nineteenth century’’ (Silver
1997: 3). This last phrase is indicative of the calculated uses of Romantic theory in
works that often sought, as José Escobar put it, to displace contemporary sociopolitical concerns onto a transcendent imaginative plane (Escobar 1989: 322). Spanish
Romanticism therefore contains, at its core, a series of mediated reflections upon the
ideological and existential concerns of nineteenth-century humanity, albeit those
concerns are customarily transposed onto national themes, legends, and traditions of
an earlier age. It is perhaps ironic that a nation should forge its own imaginative
paradigm out of a vision that is translated from abroad, but Spanish writers expressly
adapted that vision to the demands of their own situation at a conflictive and pivotal
moment in their country’s history.
References and Further Reading
Alonso Cortés, Narciso (1943). Zorrilla, su vida y
sus obras. Valladolid: Diputación.
Alonso Seoane, Marı́a José (1993). ‘‘Introducción.’’
In Francisco Martı́nez de la Rosa, La conjuración
de Venecia, año de 1310. Madrid: Cátedra.
Caldera, Ermanno (1988). ‘‘El teatro en el siglo
XIX.’’ In José Marı́a Dı́ez Borque (ed.), Historia
del teatro en España. II. Siglos XVIII y XIX.
Madrid: Taurus, pp. 377-624.
Cardwell, Richard (1988). ‘‘Byron: Text and
Counter Text.’’ Byron and Europe, Special issue
Renaissance and Modern Studies, 32: 6-23.
Cardwell, Richard (1991). ‘‘Introduction.’’ In José
de Espronceda, The Student of Salamanca/El estudiante de Salamanca, trans. C. K. Davies. Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips.
Churchman, Philip (1909). ‘‘Byron and Espronceda.’’ Revue Hispanique, 20: 5-210.
Dı́az, Nicomedes-Pastor (1969). Obras completas de
don Nicomedes-Pastor Dı́az, ed. José Marı́a Castro
y Calvo, 3 vols. Madrid: Rivadeneyra.
Escobar, José (1989). ‘‘Romanticismo y revolución.’’ In David T. Gies (ed.), El romanticismo.
Madrid: Taurus, pp. 320-35.
Flitter, Derek (1992). Spanish Romantic Literary
Theory and Criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Flitter, Derek (1993). ‘‘Zorrilla, the Critics and the
Direction of Spanish Romanticism.’’ In Richard
A. Cardwell and Ricardo Landeira (eds.),
José Zorrilla: 1893-1993. Centennial Readings.
Nottingham, UK: University of Nottingham
Monographs in the Humanities, 1-15.
Flitter, Derek (2000). ‘‘Ideological Uses of Romantic Theory in Spain.’’ In Carol Tully (ed.),
Romantik and Romance: Cultural Interanimation
in European Romanticism. Glasgow: Strathclyde
Modern Language Studies 4, pp. 79-107.
Garcı́a Gutiérrez, Antonio (1997). El trovador, ed.
Carlos Ruiz Silva. Madrid: Cátedra.
Gies, David T. (ed.) (1989). El romanticismo.
Madrid: Taurus.
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Gies, David T. (1994). The Theatre in NineteenthCentury Spain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Gil y Carrasco, Enrique (1954). Obras completas de
don Enrique Gil y Carrasco, ed. Jorge Campos.
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Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio (1971). Los amantes
de Teruel, ed. Salvador Garcı́a Castañeda. Madrid: Castalia.
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Peña, Madrid: Cátedra.
17
Pushkin and Romanticism
Michael Basker
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) enjoys an unassailable reputation, not
only as the greatest writer of the Romantic era in Russia (the ‘‘Pushkin period,’’ as it is
often known), but as Russia’s greatest national poet and the protean source of virtually
everything of significance in the Russian literature to follow. His first, precocious
success in 1820 coincided with the eventual and thorough consolidation of Romanticism – which, like literary movements before and since, had come to Russia late:
after a protracted period of Sentimentalism (pre-Romanticism) that had coexisted
alongside neo-Classicism since the 1770s, it had been slowly established over the
previous decade and a half, primarily thorough the meditative elegies and epistles,
literary ballads and songs of V. A. Zhukovksii and the elegies of Konstantin Batiushkov. It reached its peak in the 1820s, and came to an effective end with the premature
deaths of Pushkin and, four years later, a second figure of unquestionable genius,
Mikhail Lermontov. By a curious – or symptomatic – coincidence, both were killed in
duels, in which ill-founded rumor has persistently sought to implicate imperial
authority, in 1837 and 1841, at the respective ages of 37 and 26. The early 1840s
saw such major vestiges of Romantic writing in Russia as F. I. Tiutchev’s continuing
metaphysical lyricism, V. F. Odoevskii’s Russian Nights (1844), and N. V. Gogol’s
evocations of the phantasmagoric metropolis in The Portrait and The Overcoat. It is
notable, however, that these last of Gogol’s five ‘‘Petersburg tales’’ appeared in the
same year as Part I of his Dead Souls (1842). This was the period of the rise of Russian
Realism, the prelude to the golden age of the Russian novel.
Despite Pushkin’s centrality to a period which is labeled the Age of Pushkin as
readily as the Age of Romanticism, his own allegiance to Romantic precepts was
rarely and only briefly unalloyed. Particularly in Russian criticism, his artistic
evolution is typically represented as a path from neo-Classicism through Romanticism to Realism. In truth, though, the progression is far from clear. Pushkin, as we
shall see, was perennially capable of blurring distinctions and transcending lines
of demarcation. He had an ability to entertain contrarieties which may seem
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Romantic in origin, but is ultimately subversive of all fixed points of view, all single
outlooks, including the Romantic. He is simultaneously Romantic and not Romantic, and elements of all three modes (Classicist, Realist, Romantic) often coexist and
interact.
In one respect, Pushkin’s credentials as Romantic are apparent from the very range
of his writing, which at least from the time he graduated from the Lyceum at Tsarskoe
Selo in 1817 had the character of incessant experimentation. He produced elegies and
‘‘Byronic’’ verse narratives, Ossianic poems and gothic ballads, graveyard poetry and
nocturnal meditations, not only some half-dozen ‘‘fairy tales’’ but also, in Evgenii
Onegin, an entire novel in verse, which drew initial impetus from Byron’s Beppo and
has been frequently compared to the latter’s Don Juan, but is essentially and gloriously
sui generis. In drama, Pushkin spurned prevalent neoclassical conventions for what he
discerned as the model of Shakespeare (‘‘free and broad portrayal of character,’’
‘‘verisimilitude of situation and truth of dialogue,’’ ‘‘art’’ untrammeled by ‘‘Rules’’;
Pushkin 1956-8, VII: 164, X: 162, VII: 38).1 In conjunction with his reading of
N. M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, this led in Boris Godunov (1824-5,
published 1831) to another startlingly unprecedented generic hybrid that he himself
thought of as a ‘‘truly Romantic tragedy’’ (Pushkin, 1956-8, VII: 73). Shakespearian
plotlines have also been discerned behind the four no less startlingly innovative
‘‘Little Tragedies’’ – condensedly fragmentary studies in extremes either of passion
(avarice in The Covetous Knight, envy in Mozart and Salieri, the erotic imperative in The
Stone Guest) or situation (The Feast in the Time of the Plague; all 1830). The prose to
which Pushkin turned increasingly over his last decade included a cycle of parodic
short stories with a relatively complex series of embedded narrators (The Tales of
Belkin, 1830), a consummate tale of the supernatural (The Queen of Spades, 1833,
published 1834), and a ‘‘historical romance’’ somewhat superficially à la Walter Scott
(The Captain’s Daughter, 1835-6). Biographically, too, there is much to consolidate
Pushkin’s Romantic image. Above all, he had the aura of exile. Pushkin was banished
from St Petersburg in 1820 at the direct behest of Alexander I, as the result of a
handful of vicious epigrams on prominent government figures and some liberal verses
critical of serfdom and (more mildly) autocracy: dispatched first to the south (travels
through the Caucasus, Kishinev, Odessa); then, after further misdemeanors – insubordination, injudicious amorous pursuits, an incautious avowal of atheism in a letter
intercepted by the authorities – to the monotonous Russian rural isolation of his
parents’ small provincial estate of Mikhailovskoe (1824-6). The theme and the pose of
exile, as well as a sense of his own marginality – as the descendant of Peter the Great’s
black protégé, on the fringe of ‘‘society,’’ the court, and the aristocracy – were of
lasting significance to him. Other traits of the Romantic personality seem manifest in
Pushkin’s avid womanizing (there exists an encrypted and somewhat disputed ‘‘Don
Juan’s’’ list, the significance of which is perhaps easily exaggerated), in his inveterate
dueling (upwards of 30 duels, according to some calculations), or, say, in the nearobsessive gambling which betrays an abiding, superstitious fascination with the
workings of fate.
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Yet for all Pushkin’s espousal of Romantic norms, caveats are almost invariably
required. Stylistically, with rare exceptions (Boris Godunov?), there is a Classicist’s
striving for lightness and elegance, symmetry and harmony of form (from overall
structure to metrical and stanzaic pattern and the texture of sound), economy, clarity,
and precision of expression. Behaviorally, too, the author who avowed to Alexander’s
successor, Nicholas I, his sympathy for the Decembrist insurrectionists of 1825,
became increasingly conservative (or, it could be argued, realistically fatalistic) in
his appraisal of the autocracy, a supporter of the status quo whose intolerance of the
Polish unrest of the 1830s, for instance, shocked liberal colleagues. After much
anxious soul-searching he also became a family man, who sought – though never
quite found – an ideal of family happiness and peace, and whose religious faith
certainly deepened in his last years. Above all, however, it would seem that Pushkin
simply did not share the intense self-absorption of the full-fledged Romantic (‘‘I am
not cut out to be the hero of a Romantic poem,’’ he admitted apropos of The Prisoner of
the Caucasus in a letter of 1822; Pushkin 1956-8, X: 49). He maintained an intellectual fascination not so much with Romantic philosophy (he never shared his Russian
contemporaries’ widespread enthusiasm for Schelling and German Idealism) as with
the Romantic typology that dominated the age; but he also almost unfailingly
displayed a subversively rationalist skepticism, a playful detachment, an awareness
of others and openness to multiplicity of perspective, and, in the final analysis, a sheer
curiosity and zest for life, that set him apart from the tortured introversion of the
archetypally Romantic being. This distinction becomes particularly apparent by
contrast with Lermontov – one of whose finest ‘‘late’’ lyrics, constitutes the nighttime
meditation of a solitary lyric self on a metaphorical open road (<Ds[j;e jlby z yf
ljhjue> – ‘‘I come out alone upon the road,’’ 1841, Lermontov 1964: 127-8). The
poem dwells on alienation from the natural and divine order and the incomprehensible pain of individual existence, accepts that the past is unworthy of regret and that
life has nothing more to offer, and moves on, predictably enough, to a yearning for
easeful death, ‘‘oblivion and sleep.’’ Pushkin, in <<tpevys[ ktn eufcitt
dtctkmt> (‘‘The burnt-out joy of reckless years,’’ 1830), a scarcely less pivotal elegiac
contemplation of an extinguished past and the gloomy (eysksq - a key epithet in
the Russian Romantic code) present path to a future of toil and grief, nevertheless
makes a tellingly different appraisal of a comparable predicament. The past remains a
source of attachment, not alienation (‘‘the sorrow of former days becomes stronger, the
older it is’’), and solution is sought not in death but in a graciously accepting openness
to life and the (classicizing?) hope that harmony, pleasure, and even love will be
renewed:
Yj yt [jxe^ j lhenb^ evbhfnm*
Z ;bnm [jee^ xnj, vsckbnm cnhflfnm^
B dtlf.^ vyt ,elen yfckf;ltymz
Vt; ujhtcntq^ pf,jn b uhtdkytymz%
Gjhjq jgznm ufhvjybtq egm.cm^
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Yfl dsvsckjv cktpfvb j,jkm.cm^
B vj;tn ,snm -- yf vjq pfrfn gtxfkmysq
<ktcytn k.,jdm eks,rj. ghjifkmyjq (Pushkin, 1956-58, III: 178)
(But I do not want, my friends, to die; / I want to live, to think and suffer, / And I know
that I will have pleasures / Amidst sorrows, troubles, and tribulations; / At times I will
again be intoxicated with harmony, / And shall shed tears over my creative invention, /
And perhaps, at my sad sunset, / Love will shine with a farewell smile.)
The temperamental contrast and specificity might be amplified by a lengthy series of
similar examples. Pushkin’s own espousal of, and distancing from, Romanticism is
manifest in various ways almost constantly throughout his career: this essay will
concentrate on some key literary works of his most Romantic period of Southern exile,
of 1820-4, culminating in his ‘‘problematization’’ of the Romantic aesthetic in
The Gypsies, and look briefly thereafter at his continuing ruminations on Romantic
themes in a small selection of major works: Eugene Onegin, Mozart and Salieri, and The
Bronze Horseman.
First Success and Southern Exile: Pushkin’s Byronic Phase
Pushkin began his poetic career in prolific fashion as a pupil at the newly opened and
remarkably enlightened Imperial Lyceum (1811-17). His more important verse of the
period, such as ‘‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’’ (1814), betrays an odic quality
stemming directly from neo-Classicism, and a rationalistic didacticism which is
equally of no account in the present context. A different matter is the first and
longest of his narrative poems, Ruslan and Liudmila, the almost 3,000 lines and six
cantos of which were completed over the three years to 1820 and brought the young
author immediate celebrity. This exuberant mock-heroic epic tells of Liudmila’s
wedding-night abduction by the dwarf-magician, Chernomor, and the quest for her
recovery by Ruslan and three envious rival suitors (Rogdai, Ratmir, and Farlaf). After
many fanciful episodes, enabling protracted evocations of a wicked witch and 12
seductive maidens in their enchanted castle, of a magic hat that confers invisibility,
and a martial encounter with a severed head, Ruslan engages in an epic struggle with
Chernomor – whose power is in his beard, which raises him and Ruslan hundreds of
feet into the air. When the hero hacks off the beard the tale promises to conclude with
his success; but Ruslan is then killed by the cowardly Farlaf, who abducts the sleeping
Liudmila. Unsurprisingly, Ruslan is nevertheless revived at last, by the magical
‘‘living and dead water’’ of Russian folk tradition, to relieve the besieged city of
Kiev and awaken his bride for the ritual happy ending. Critics have concurred in
finding no profound meaning here. Ruslan and Liudmila is a virtuoso piece in which
plot matters less than the manner of its telling; and if there is much ingenious
invention, there is also much scarcely concealed borrowing, in a playful amalgam of
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Ossianic and Russian folk-heroic motifs (traditional heroic narrative bylina epic and
fairy tale), elegant eroticism in the manner of Bogdanovich, and elements appropriated from Ariosto, Voltaire (La Pucelle), Parny, and others besides. Above all, it would
seem, the poem constitutes a complex parodic game with the lyric forms of Pushkin’s
immediate predecessors, Zhukovskii and Batiushkov. Parody and the eclectic combination of seemingly uncombinable elements was – and would long remain –
Pushkin’s path to the affirmation of his own poetic voice. The poetic procedure, in
its unconstrained neglect of accepted rules, also reflected what he himself then
thought of as ‘‘Romanticism.’’
Pushkin’s most intensive Romantic phase, in the more conventionally accepted
sense of the term, began however with his banishment from the capital in the weeks
that saw Ruslan and Liudmila into print. His fresh departure, literary as well as literal,
was heralded by the impressive elegy ‘‘Extinguished is the orb of day’’ (<Gjufckj
lytdyjt cdtnbkj>; Pushkin, 1956-8, II: 7-8), written on board the ship that took
him from Feodosiia to Gurzuf in August 1820. An atmospheric seascape is the
background to a melancholic meditation on unhappy love and parting, the loss of
youth, the treachery of friends and confidantes, and the cooling of the heart; but it is
the poetic persona’s very shift to self-analysis that is of greatest moment. Evidently
seeking to forestall the imputations of his readers, Pushkin retrospectively subtitled
his poem ‘‘An Imitation of Byron.’’ In reality, it was a reworking of the elegiac
conventions of Batiushkov: another piece of experimental appropriation, which incidentally anticipated the already quoted ‘‘The burnt-out joy of reckless years’’ in its
ungeneric insistence on the possibility of ‘‘new adventures’’ ahead.
Over the next months, Pushkin did indeed become an avid reader of Byron.
The fruits of his enthusiasm are particularly apparent in four narrative poems –
The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820-1, published 1822), the never completed The Robber
Brothers (1821-2, extant fragment published 1825), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai
(1821-3, published 1824), and The Gypsies (1824, published 1827). Collectively,
these exotic tales of alienation and passion are habitually referred to as Pushkin’s
‘‘Southern’’ or (more especially by Western critics) his ‘‘Byronic’’ poems.
There is some critical debate as to how far The Prisoner of the Caucasus is indeed
beholden to Byron, about whom Pushkin, on his own admission, now ‘‘raved’’
(Pushkin, 1956-8, VII: 170). Its plot has been likened to Chateaubriand’s Atala,
and there are palpable borrowings from the native Russian elegy and descriptive
narrative poem. It seems clear enough, however, that The Prisoner could not have been
conceived without the ‘‘Eastern’’ precedent of The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, and
particularly The Corsair. Its Russian hero has left his native land in search of freedom
and, as he confesses to the silently attentive Circassian maid who falls in love with
him, he is weary of his world, having rejected the ‘‘conditions of society’’ and left
behind an unhappy love in a shadowy past. But there are multiple ironies – indubitably more Pushkinian than Byronic. The hero seeks freedom, but spends the entirety
of the poem in chains – a ‘‘slave,’’ as the narrator repeatedly puts it, held captive in a
remote village by indifferent, bellicose Caucasian tribesmen. When the latter are
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again called away to arms, the ‘‘strong’’ hero is released by the young girl, to whom he
pledges his affection as she proffers the saw that will cut away his shackles. But she is
more fiercely constant in emotional commitment than he. He has previously spurned
her advances, on the grounds that past experience of unrequited passion prevents him
from loving again; rejected, the Circassian mirrors his sentiment, but differs in her
unwavering refusal to relent. The price of his freedom is her wonderfully, unByronically understated suicide; she dies wordlessly, fading almost imperceptibly
into the river he has just crossed so that, with scarcely a backward glance in her
direction, he is ‘‘free’’ to return to the Russian army from whence he came.
The poem is, in Byronic fashion, episodic, beginning in medias res, with little detail
of past events (Pushkin even excised from the final version the description of the
hero’s capture). ‘‘Plot’’ is punctuated by grandiose descriptions of Caucasian nature –
and more prosaic ones of Circassian daily life – which together make up more than a
quarter of the text. These are, however, markedly more precise, and laconic, than in
Byron, while characters are depicted through speech and action, with little interiority.
The narrative is restrainedly undigressive, and the entire poem, though longer than
those which follow, runs to a modest 777 lines of iambic tetrameter. Its tacit ironies
are unsettlingly compounded in the Epilogue, which unexpectedly praises not the
freedom of the local tribesmen and exhilarating natural scene, but Russian military
conquest of the savage Caucasian lands.
A less satisfactory extension of the Byronic manner was The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The merits of this poem – which Pushkin later dismissed out of hand (‘‘Between
you and me,’’ he confided to his friend Viazemskii, ‘‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai is
rubbish . . . ’’; Pushkin, 1956-8, X: 67) – are in the static, sensual description of the
harem at Bakhchisarai and the enveloping sense of nostalgia for days and grandiloquent deeds long past. The poem offers considerably more than The Prisoner in the way
of lyrical interpolation and apostrophe, simile and subjectivism; it is more atmospheric and altogether more ‘‘decorative,’’ but plot and intellectual substance suffer
accordingly. It tells how, some centuries ago, the fierce Crimean Khan Girei fell for
the latest addition to his harem, a beautiful Polish maiden whose princely father he
had slaughtered on a raid of conquest. The captive Mariia understandably spurns
Girei’s advances. Girei is distraught and abandons the harem – thus paving the way
for his former favorite, Zarema, desperate to reassert her place in her beloved’s
affections, to confront Mariia in an impassioned monologue. Pushkin’s recourse to
‘‘disconnected fragments’’ – as he put it in another letter to Viazemskii and repeated
in a letter to A. A. Del’vig a few days later (Pushkin, 1956-8, X: 69, 71) – allows him
to sidestep narration of the dramatic consequences of this encounter (a procedure he
would repeat, tongue-in-cheek, in Chapter 3 of Onegin, and in earnest at the close of
Mozart and Salieri). Mariia, it transpires, ‘‘passed suddenly away,’’ and Zarema,
‘‘whatever her guilt,’’ was put to death the same night – drowned by ‘‘mute’’ guards
whose silence explains nothing. Girei continues thereafter his despondently bloodthirsty rampage through distant lands.
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It is striking that the reticence and concision of exposition which in Pushkin are
perennial strengths and sources of complexity, prove less than effective in this
overcharged Romantic context. The Khan’s character, in particular, is depicted
entirely from without, through gesture and deed. We see the responses of the Byronic
hero, but the inner turmoil they reflect is nowhere explicitly disclosed, and he seems
hopelessly stereotypical as a result. Even the more interesting juxtaposition of the
passionate, sensual, eloquent, Muslim-convert Zarema to the appropriately named
Mariia, palely virginal, pious, passive, and silent, is in this instance too inflexibly
schematic to persuade.
Romanticism Declined: The Significance of The Gypsies
By the time of The Gypsies, Pushkin’s artistic and intellectual divergence from the
Byronic model crystallizes into a more general expression of disenchantment with
Romanticism. The poem can be read as a subversive rejection both of ByronicRomantic individualism and of the Rousseauesque concept of the noble savage. Not
surprisingly, there is a concomitant shift in poetic. The Gypsies is the shortest and
densest of the Southern poems, arranged into 11 unnumbered dramatic episodes.
Characters’ speech, interspersed with laconic ‘‘stage directions,’’ is paramount. Narrative interventions are brief, and limited description notably takes the form of
ethnographically precise, saturated cataloguing. Two short lyrical digressions – on
Ovid’s exile, and the ‘‘little bird of God’’ which knows neither tribulation nor toil and
can winter insouciantly in the West – are thematically pointed; and in contrast to the
previous works, which feature set-piece Circassian and Tatar ‘‘songs’’ divorced from
plot, a gypsy song performed here by Zemfira (‘‘Old husband, Dread husband, Cut
me, Burn me’’; Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 218) is directly provocative of the tragic
denouement. A further departure from Romantic prolixity is seen in the elegant
structural symmetries in the disposition of scenes and characters, particularly in
opening and closing episodes.
The basic story is the already familiar one of the educated European who flees his
society in search of freedom and fulfillment in exotic otherness, amidst a more
primitive people: in this case, a nomadic gypsy band, wandering the Bessarabian
steppe. Although Aleko (Pushkin’s namesake, as is routinely indicated) is ‘‘pursued by
the law’’ (Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 208), his invective against ‘‘the unfreedom of stifling
cities, / Where people trade their liberty / And bow their heads before idols’’ (p. 213)
lends this deliberately vague formulation a glamorously political connotation. It
might, however, also be noted that Aleko seemingly falls in with the gypsies more
by accident than exercise of will – led almost ignominiously to their encampment by
his lover Zemfira. She has found him, inauspiciously, ‘‘behind the burial mound,’’ and
at once asserts a startlingly confident, proprietorial assurance (‘‘He is ready to follow
me anywhere . . . He will be mine’’; p. 208).
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For two years Aleko leads a life of ease with Zemfira – by whom he fathers a child –
and the larger gypsy community. But Zemfira tires of him, and he has bad dreams. He
admits to her father, who recounts how Zemfira’s mother, Mariula, abandoned him for
another, that he, Aleko, could not behave in the same way as the father had: <Jn ghfd
vjb[ yt jnrf;ecm> (‘‘I shall not renounce my rights’’; Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 227).
Not only would he assert his claim to curtail the woman’s freedom, but he would not
hesitate to exact vengeance on his rival, whom he would kick viciously from a cliff top
even while he slumbered, and find sweet pleasure in the sound of his fall. When
Zemfira arranges another graveyard rendezvous with another gypsy, the prognostication is borne out: Aleko murders both Zemfira and her new lover. Directionless, no
longer in possession of himself, he is left behind by the gypsies on the following day
like a wounded crane in autumn.
Unlike that of the previous poems, the moral of this tale is explicitly pointed by
Zemfira’s anonymous father, the ‘‘Old Man’’:
Ns yt hj;lty lkz lbrjq ljkb^
Ns lkz ct,z kbim [jxtim djkb (Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 234)
(‘‘You are not born for a savage lot, / You want freedom for yourself alone’’)
The Western individualist’s Romantic quest for freedom is narrowly egocentric. It is
also ruinous to others. The Byronic cult of willful passion and bloody vengeance is
exposed, in ordinary human terms, as shockingly vicious and shabbily self-indulgent
(the Byronic overtone is incidentally made emphatic by a parodic echo of The Corsair
in the cliff-top episode just referred to), and the very motive for fleeing society might
seem suspect. (One begins to wonder whether Aleko in his urban past had not already
committed some comparable criminal act – not of political protest, but of spiteful
violence.) In any case, the prejudices and assumptions of that society cannot be shaken
off: Aleko cannot but think in terms of ‘‘rights’’ (a conspicuously ‘‘civilized,’’ legalistic
concept), of ownership and the ungypsy-like convention of monogamy, if not actual
marriage; of what is ‘‘mine.’’ He was indeed ‘‘not born’’ for a wild lot (the rhyming of
dolia and volia, ‘‘lot’’ and ‘‘freedom,’’ will persist in Pushkin), for as always, ‘‘freedom’’
of choice and action are inevitably compromised from the outset by the contingency
of origin.
By contrast to Aleko, the ‘‘savage (gypsy) lot,’’ as presented by the chorus-like
figure of the unindividualistic ‘‘Old Man,’’ seems admirably noble. Its superiority is
most poignantly apparent in the words with which, without a trace of vengefulness,
he dismisses the proud selfhood and societal norms of his own daughter’s killer:
Jcnfdm yfc^ ujhlsq xtkjdtr!
Vs lbrb^ ytn e yfc pfrjyjd^
Vs yt nthpftv^ yt rfpybv --
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Yt ye;yj rhjdb yfv b cnjyjd -Yj ;bnm c e,bqwtq yt [jnbv . . .
. . . Vs hj,rb b lj,hs leij.^
Ns pjk b cvtk -- jcnfdm ;t yfc . . . (Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 233-4)
(‘‘Leave us, proud man! / We are savage, we have no laws, / We do not torture, do not
execute, / We do not need blood and groans, / But we do not wish to live with a
murderer. . . . / We are timid and good of soul, / You are wicked and bold – leave us . . . ’’)
It is, however, entirely characteristic of the maturing Pushkin’s skeptical relativism
that this seeming apotheosis of ‘‘noble savagery’’ proves more provisional than its
dignified rhetoric and final position in the narrative might initially intimate.
In the first place, the Gypsies’ day-to-day existence is in truth scarcely more
attractive than the aspirations of the freedom-seeking individualist. On the very
first morning in the Gypsy camp, the Old Man, with a stylistic incongruity that
may reinforce the point, calls on Zemfira and Aleko to leave their ‘‘bed of luxury’’
(Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 210): life henceforth will be a matter of humdrum toil. Aleko
must choose a trade – and leads a tamed, suggestively shackled bear around the
villages for cash. Even gypsies, it is wryly implied, are not free to ignore basic
economic needs; while a passing reference to ‘‘unreaped millet’’ (p. 217) suggests
that Aleko and his adoptive family supplement their meager income by some petty
thieving from the peasants’ fields. The Romantic myth is deflated by some ‘‘ignoble’’
realism.
There are other reservations of a different order. If Aleko’s violence is reprehensible,
so, paradoxically, may be the fatalistic passivity by which the Old Man resigned
himself to Mariula’s desertion. Since then he has cared for Zemfira but never looked at
another woman; his own existence has become woefully limited, so narrowly circumscribed that his very renunciation has perhaps made him prematurely ‘‘old’’ (Zemfira
is not yet 20). This is mirrored in leitmotifs of coldness that characterize him from the
first scene; but it is his failure to do anything to prevent the final bloody debacle that
that makes his unassuming ‘‘nobility’’ positively reprehensible. His wisdom, perspicacity, and lengthy private conversations with both Aleko and Zemfira equip him to
foresee disaster; but, as with Mariula, and in stark contrast to Aleko, he does not react.
He allows ‘‘fate’’ to take its very predictable course.
From yet another point of view, however, the Old Man’s ‘‘golden age’’ depiction of
the Gypsies as timid and innately good is in itself erroneously untenable. Eloquent
proofs are his own daughter’s bold passion and aggressive individualism, and the
‘‘traditional’’ Gypsy song of vengeance and pain with which she exultingly goads her
husband. Love (erotic passion) and Death seem as inextricably intertwined here as in
the sophisticated world of the Byronic-Romantic; and this chimes with the assertion
of the narrator, who is suddenly personalized in a brief (and once more militaristic)
epilogue, to conclude:
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Yj cxfcnmz ytn b vt;le dfvb^
Ghbhjls ,tlyst csys!
. . . B dc.le cnhfcnb hjrjdst^
B jn celt, pfobns ytn& (Pushkin 1956-8, IV: 235-6)
(But there is no happiness even with you, / Poor sons of nature! / . . . And everywhere are
fateful passions, / And from the fates there is no defense.)
Put another way, this is to dismiss as misconceived and ultimately illusory the
juxtaposition of gypsy and urban-European, ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ around which
much of the poem (and a major strand of Romanticism) has ostensibly been structured.
More fundamental to The Gypsies, it finally appears, is an underlying contrast of
recurrent character types that cut across distinctions of ethnicity, ideology, and
cultural trend: between active and passive temperaments, the proclivity either to
rebel against the vicissitudes of fate, to resist or reject the way things are (to kick the
sleeping body over the cliff, however futile the gesture) which, for the sake of
convenience, might be labeled Romantic, or, by contrast, to accept whatever tribulations life may serve up, in a conservative acquiescence in the universal status quo.
The difficulty here is that neither is satisfactory: the one leads to death and destruction, the other to limitation and denial of life. The pivotal significance of The Gypsies
in Pushkin’s oeuvre lies, however, in the articulation of the problem. The poem
presages a transition, an end to exclusive concentration on the Romantic mindset
toward a broader, and more broadly realist, examination of how best to understand
and accommodate to the dilemma of living – not beyond societal norms, but within
the social, historical, and even biological spheres by which every individual, weak or
strong, is in reality inescapably constrained. The issue will be perennially restated by
Pushkin through various recontextualizations of the polarities just outlined. And for
all the apparent wrong-headedness and insubstantiality of Aleko, the Romantic vision
and the powerful man of will continue to figure almost obsessively in Pushkin’s
thinking, as a fascinating component within a set of competing alternatives.
Romanticism Recontextualized
The most obvious and indisputably important embodiment of this change is the novel
in verse Evgenii Onegin, which Pushkin began in 1823 and completed in 1831. Work
on the second chapter was contemporaneous with The Gypsies. In plot terms, Pushkin
now places the Byronic hero not in the exotic elsewhere of the literary imagination,
but firmly within a contemporary Russian society evoked with such a wealth of detail
that the most important and influential of all Russian nineteenth-century critics,
Vissarion Belinskii, was famously prompted to describe the work as an ‘‘encyclopedia’’
of Russian life (Belinskii 1953-9, VII: 503). Not surprisingly, Onegin fares no better
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than his ‘‘Southern’’ predecessors. Moreover, one of the profound issues Pushkin now
addresses is the sincerity of the Romantic pose, the relationship of fashionable
attitudinizing to authentic being: what is the ‘‘true’’ self, and how far – if at all –
can individual personality be realized independently of, or even through the medium
of, the assumptions of the day.
Onegin, after a frivolous upbringing, becomes splenetically disenchanted with the
privileged but seemingly vacuous world of high society to which he was born, but
flees (not least to escape his debts) no further than his dying uncle’s modest provincial
estate. From this initial high-point of lofty-minded independence, he falls steadily in
the estimation of both narrator and reader. In contrast to the garrulous narrator, this
Romantic hero becomes habitually bored after just three days in the country, and like
the Prisoner of the Caucasus, soon spurns the advances of a local maid, similarly
protesting that he is ‘‘not intended for happiness,’’ that his elevated soul is ill-suited
to conjugal bliss. In this case, however, the response is tinged with a banal ordinariness. Although Onegin cannot fail to distress ‘‘poor Tatiana,’’ he behaves better than
he might: he neither cynically seduces her nor discloses her indiscretion to others, and
in the speech he delivers in the (un-Romantic) kitchen garden, with its patronizing
and ultimately ironic injunction to the young interlocutor to learn greater selfcontrol, is guilty of little more than slightly pompous moralizing. His blinkered
egotism will nevertheless soon do more serious harm to others, and rebound upon
himself. His underestimation of Tatiana’s resilience and consequent petty irritation
during her nameday party leads him, in unedifying pique (more deflationary banality!), to manufacture a situation in which his impetuous younger friend, Lenskii, is
almost bound to challenge him to a duel. Onegin duly if inadvertently murders him,
through a double failure both to exercise the self-control he had counseled to Tatiana
and to transcend a concern for social opinion (what might be thought of him if he
calls off the fight) which ill accords with his pose of cynical superiority. Lenskii’s
death is, in broader terms, an epitaph on the defunct Sentimentalist elegiac posturing
he espouses, and which Pushkin revisits with some echoes of his own early work and
self. But the weakness – and ordinariness – of the Byronic hero are almost as fatal. The
narrator parts company with him for a while, then abandons him in ignominious
posture at the novel’s inconclusive ‘‘end,’’ lovelorn (if he is capable of sincere emotion)
at the feet of an unresponsive Tatiana, the Romantic muddle in his head an obstacle to
timely maturation.
The point is reinforced by the contrasting growth of the heroine, from the thoughtpatterns of European pre-Romantic novels by ‘‘Richardson and Rousseau,’’ and a
contrary, concurrent immersion in the customs and superstitions of the Russian
folk, toward greater analytical acumen and increasing understanding of self and
world. Unlike earlier, suicidal heroines – or even the Old Man of The Gypsies –
Tatiana does not perish as a result of rejection, but determines to learn the truth about
‘‘the one for whom she sighed.’’ Gradually disabused, she exercises what modicum of
choice she can within the limiting conventions of her society, rejecting unsuitable
suitors to attain to a notable element of inner freedom in the marriage she finally
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contracts. This takes her beyond the limitations and delusions of the various forms of
self-indulgent Romanticism the novel has examined, to a self-possessed control and
intellectually clear-sighted acuity which are nevertheless not devoid of ‘‘poetic’’
sensibility. In this she is put forward as the narrator’s ‘‘Ideal.’’
However, this ‘‘storyline’’ constitutes only one facet of the ‘‘novel in verse,’’ the
quintessentially Pushkinian, hybrid form of which, it might be argued, neatly reflects
the polarities of the heroine’s (and narrator’s) progression. The prosaic and poetic,
‘‘novel’’ and ‘‘verse,’’ effusive Romanticism and illusion-dispelling ‘‘realism,’’ are
thematized in a series of incessant contrasts and judgmental evaluations between
sets of ideas and inclinations – on the one hand, for instance, youth, love, springtime,
glamorous foreign importations, inspiration, dreams, and illusion; on the other, the
caution of age, analytical reason, self and self-interest, winter, the unexotically
Russian, analytical reason, cynicism, and disillusion (see Woodward 1982). Such
contrarieties not only frame and encompass the actions and motives of characters,
but constantly engender temperamentally contrastive appraisals of even the most
everyday objects (‘‘pale Diana’’; ‘‘the stupid moon on the stupid horizon’’). In all this,
the narrative procedures of the ‘‘free novel’’ – so replete with digression and overt
narratorial play that the entire work has sometimes been deemed a parodic game,
enacted around the shadowy semblance of a plot – are notably offset by the strict form
of the idiosyncratically contrived, endlessly flexible but impeccably observed 14-line
‘‘Onegin stanza.’’ Whatever the implications of the characters’ fates, ‘‘Romantic’’
unconstraint and ‘‘classical’’ precision seem equally and inextricably manifest in the
very fabric of the work.
While these differing strands continue to find varied formal and thematic reflection in many subsequent works, Pushkin’s most challenging and complex reappraisal
of the particular problem of the Romantic rebel is surely to be found in Mozart and
Salieri. Like Aleko and Onegin, Salieri, too, is driven to murder. But the act he
commits – the poisoning of the world’s greatest musician, calculated, in a sense, over a
period of 18 years – is anything but impulsive. In consequence, his stature seems
immeasurably greater.
Salieri is himself a formidable musician, who has risen to success by dint of hard
work and talent, the archetypally brooding Romantic artist’s lifetime of singleminded dedication to his art. Mozart, however, has been born with an unrivaled,
unsurpassable genius, a gift of which – in Salieri’s jaundiced view – he is unaware and
utterly unworthy, and which is detrimental to the smooth evolution of the musical art
Salieri loves. It is the complex, double-edged emotion of envy – simultaneous
antipathy and adoration – which ostensibly prompts him to kill. But it emerges
from the powerfully eloquent, paradoxically rational analyses of this condition –
which occupy the two soliloquies at the heart of Pushkin’s maximally condensed,
two-scene drama – that the underlying cause is a resentment at the very order of life
that can allow such gross injustice. As much might be gleaned from the play’s
startling opening words (the musical simile, incidentally, constituting the unobtrusive first sign of monomaniacal obsession):
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Dct ujdjhzn% ytn ghfdls yf ptvkt&
Yj yhfdls ytn — b dsit& Lkz vtyz
Nfr ’nj zcyj^ rfr ghjcnfz ufvvf& (Pushkin, 1956-8, V: 357)
(All say there is no truth2 on earth. / But there is no truth on high. / That is as clear to
me as a simple scale.)
Salieri, in going beyond the opinion of the crowd (‘‘All say’’), implicitly aligns himself
here with the grandest of all Romantic rebels against God’s providence – and his
Satanic quality is tacitly underscored by imagery of fire and the serpent, of the poison
he has carried for many loveless years at his breast, even, it might be argued, by a
punning on the Russian word for poison (iad ) that implicates both hell (ad ) and
overweening selfhood (ia: I).3 It is one of the play’s many paradoxes that this rebel
wants greater order, progress, justice, and control than life can offer: his is a Romantic
rebellion in the name of classical clarity, that would exclude all that is random. Its
articulation includes a ‘‘justification’’ of killing in the name of a noble ideal – the
greater good ( pol’za) – that has a sinister resonance with utilitarian political philosophies and points an unnervingly direct continuum between Romantic disaffection and
High Stalinism. Not inconsistently with this, it also becomes apparent that what lies
beneath the Satanic pride (an echo of the Old Man’s valediction to Aleko?) that
prompts Salieri to challenge the disposition of the universe is self-contempt and a
hatred of life itself which, in his single-minded exclusiveness of purpose, he perhaps
never really loved. The message, as before, is that Romantic rebellion is a sterile
impasse; but its representation in this relatively late work seems curiously more
profound, agonized, and perversely ennobled than anything Pushkin had depicted
previously.
Mozart provides a potential counterbalance. His classicizing temperament enables a
light-hearted openness to the incongruous and unexpected, while in his artistic
creation, with a paradoxically Romantic prescience, he is capable of intuiting profoundly haunting visions of mortality alongside frivolous insouciance. Ultimately,
however, his life-affirming ‘‘acceptance’’ is unsettlingly naı̈ve and self-deceiving, and
it is emblematic of this that he leaves the stage for home after unwittingly drinking
poisoned wine, never suspecting that his sudden indisposition is terminal. The world
these characters inhabit is one of bleakness and chance, unavenged murder, and
sudden death without the redeeming catharsis of awareness. Divine providence, if it
exists at all, is incomprehensible in human terms.
Profound issues of Romanticism are reconsidered in such other later works as the
Queen of Spades and the Captain’s Daughter, with their common interest in the nature of
fate and respective examinations of supernatural forces and the laws of history; but a
final word on Pushkin’s Romanticism might be offered here with reference to his
greatest masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman. As is evident once more from its structure,
this poem is both Romantic and not Romantic. The ‘‘Introduction’’ is a classicizing
paean to the neoclassical city of St Petersburg, which draws heavily on the odic
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tradition, while polemicizing with the Polish Romantic Mickiewicz. The man of
will – in this case Peter the Great – is here cast not as rebellious outcast, but as the
grand constructive genius, the bringer of order, light, and progress (those things
Salieri craved!) where previously there was unenlightened, formless, ahistorical darkness. But, of course, there is a downside; and the ‘‘Introduction’’ is, with minimal
comment, juxtaposed to the gloomily autumnal tale of Evgenii, a poor denizen of the
modern city, that constitutes the main body of the poem. Unlike his previous
namesake, Onegin, this is a most unassuming individual, moved by a dream of social
conformity and the ambition for a contented marriage and happy home that is more
petty bourgeois than pastoral-idyllic. Early, submerged allusions to Melmoth or
The Giaour seem merely parodic, but when Evgenii’s hopes are dashed upon losing
his fiancée Parasha in the catastrophic flood of 1824 (God’s vengeance on Peter’s
hubristic creation?), high Romantic ingredients come to the fore: a battle with the
elements, descent into madness and a shadowy nether kingdom, restless wandering,
loss of self, and a single gesture of rebellion against the ‘‘creator’’ – Peter, or his
equestrian emblem in bronze – culminating in a phatasmagoric pursuit through
nocturnal city streets. Though it might remain uncertain whether Peter’s galloping
statue is the embodiment of some supernatural force or a mere product of the diseased
mind, the Romantic resistance of the alienated outsider, as so often in Pushkin, leads
inexorably to death.
The Bronze Horseman, shorter and denser than any other of Pushkin’s narrative
poems including The Gypsies, raises a plethora of far-reaching issues – on the nature
of identity and the forces of history; the incompatible needs of state and individual;
the nature of Russia, poised between East and West; the rights or wrongs of military
and economic progress; the pitfalls of revolution and the need for autocracy. One of
the most profound stems from the familiar polarities of acceptance and rebellion.
Evgenii fails to accept that life cannot offer fixity, a humble haven ( priiut) of peace and
certainty as the reward for honest toil, so that the ‘‘little man,’’ rather than the grand
hero, here becomes a reluctant rebel in consequence. This then chimes with Mozart
and Salieri in prompting speculation on the nature of life itself. Typically enough for
the mature Pushkin, the issue becomes most urgent, though never quite explicit, after
Evgenii’s death. His body is found on a small island in the Neva estuary, on the
threshold of a crumbling wooden hut washed up by last year’s flood and naturally
assumed by the vast majority of commentators to be that of his drowned (once more!)
Parasha. The poem might thus seem to end on a note of cathartic reconciliation –
a promise of harmonious restitution of thwarted lovers beyond the grave, notably
sanctioned by oblique references to God and resurrection. Another reading, however,
might suggest the mockery of a cruel divinity: Evgenii has reached the threshold,
where he is tantalizingly doomed to die (to quote an earlier, despairingly Romantic
passage of the poem: ‘‘Or is the whole of our life / Nothing but an empty dream, /
Heaven’s mockery of the earth?’’; Pushkin, 1956-8, IV: 388). But this view, too, may
be undercut by another. The hut is empty, all identifying features obliterated: it is,
perhaps, an entirely ‘‘random’’ remnant of the flood, and it would be the raving of a
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‘‘madman’’ to see it as anything more, to ‘‘read in’’ a connection with Parasha. There is
in other words no significant patterning of events – benevolent or mocking – no
providential logic in the apportioning of happiness or disaster. The universe is not
(classically) ordered but (Romantically) chaotic.
It may be argued that the uncertainty of the ending – which, for good measure, also
points full circle to the beginning, back to the wasteland where Peter planned to
construct life to his own design – is of itself profoundly Romantic. It might also be
construed as unblinkered, skeptical realism. It is at least certain that the Romantic
worldview continues to figure in Pushkin’s most searching exploration of the nature
of life.
Notes
1 All translations are mine.
2 Or ‘‘right,’’ or ‘‘justice’’: the Russian word is
laden with implication.
3 Cf. the illuminating discussion by Robert
Louis Jackson (1973).
References and Further Reading
Primary sources
Belinskii, Vissarion G. (1953-9). Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii, 13 vols. Moscow: Akademiia Nauk.
Lermontov, Mikhail Iu. (1964). Sobranie sochinenii,
4 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
vol. 1.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1956-8). Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. Moscow: Akademiia
Nauk.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1971). Pushkin on
Literature, ed. and trans. Tatiana Wolff. London:
Methuen; New York: Barnes and Noble.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1975). Eugene
Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. with commentary
Vladimir Nabokov, 4 vols. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1982). Mozart and
Salieri: The Little Tragedies, trans. Antony
Wood. London: Angel.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1984). Collected
Narrative and Lyrical Poetry of Alexander Pushkin,
trans. Walter Arndt. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1999). The Collected Stories, trans. Paul Debreczeny, introduction John Bayley. London: Campbell.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (2002-3). The
Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin, ed. I.
Sproat, 15 vols., Downham Market, UK:
Milner.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (2003). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Charles Johnston,
preface John Bayley, introduction and notes
Michael Basker. London: Penguin.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich and Lermontov,
Mikhail (1984). Narrative Poems by Alexander
Pushkin and by Michael Lermontov, trans. Charles
Johnston. London: The Bodley Head.
Secondary sources
Bayley, John (1971). Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bethea, David M. (1998). Realizing Metaphors:
Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press.
Binyon, T. J. (2002). Pushkin: A Biography. London, HarperCollins.
Briggs, A. D. P. (1983). Alexander Pushkin:
A Critical Study. London: Croom Helm.
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Michael Basker
Brown, William Edward (1986). A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, vol. 3. Ann
Arbor, MI: Ardis.
Debreczeny, Paul (1983). The Other Pushkin:
A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Greenleaf, Monika (1994). Pushkin and Romantic
Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Jackson, Robert Louis (1973). ‘‘Miltonic Imagery
and Design in Puškin’s Mozart and Salieri:
The Russian Satan.’’ In V. Terras (ed.), American
Contributions to the Seventh International Congress of
Slavists, Warsaw, August 21-27, 1973, Volume II:
Literature and Folklore. The Hague: Mouton,
pp. 261-9.
Leighton, Lauren, G. (1999). A Bibliography of
Alexander Pushkin in English: Studies and Translations. Lewiston, NY, Queenston, ONT, and
Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press.
Sandler, Stephanie (1989). Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Vickery, Walter N. (1992). Alexander Pushkin, revised edn. New York: Twayne.
Woodward, James (1982). ‘‘The ‘Principle of Contradictions’ in Yevgeniy Onegin.’’ Slavonic and
East European Review, 60: 25-43.
18
Lermontov: Romanticism on the
Brink of Realism
Robert Reid
Russian Romanticism: Problems of Definition
Russian Romanticism has traditionally been an area of heightened critical attention for
several reasons. First, the Romantic period as a whole coincides with the coming of age
of Russian literature and it is arguable that its future trajectory was in large measure
determined by the pioneering works of national literature which were produced
between, say, 1800 and 1840. Secondly, the most influential writers of the period –
Pushkin (1799-1837), Lermontov (1814-41), and Gogol (1809-52) – while exhibiting
in their works much that was Romantic in form and content, also subscribed to the
realist aesthetic which, according to traditional periodization, begins to supplant
Romanticism in the 1840s. If this chronology is applied rigorously it might appear
that only Gogol qualifies as a realist, and indeed Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s contributions to realism arguably lie in the influence of their works on later realist writers. A
third area which gives scope for critical debate is the perceived ideological orientation
of Romanticism. It has long been noted that attempts to define Romanticism end with
a list of topoi which defy integration into a single organic whole: individualism,
idealism, flight from reality, love of nature, nationalism, revolution, and so on. This
famously led Lovejoy ([1924] 1948) to propose that there was not one, but there were
many Romanticisms. However, this plurality has made it relatively easy for a particular
attribute to be foregrounded with paradoxical results. Thus, with the rise of critical
realism in the 1840s and 1850s, and its promotion by radical critics of the Belinskii
school, Romantic works were elevated to the canonical status once enjoyed by their
classical antecedents.1 The officially sanctioned canon which found its way into
educational institutions during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s emphasized narodnost’ –
national character or nationalism – a feature, certainly, to be found in much Romantic
writing, but a conveniently conservative one.2
Soviet literary critics confronted a problem of a quite different order. As part of the
enormous revisionist project to ensure that citizens of the Soviet state could safely
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handle its now politically incorrect pre-Revolutionary literary heritage, Romanticism
came under close critical scrutiny. Since the mid-1930s a state-sanctioned realist
aesthetic – Socialist Realism – had been elevated to canonical status and Romanticism
inevitably attracted official suspicion, a situation again facilitated by a judicious
choice of definitions: in this case individualism, idealism, and flight from reality.
By the same token, however, the more politically acceptable attributes of nineteenthcentury Romanticism – its anticonventionalism and revolutionary themes – were
emphasized per se rather than as characteristics of Romanticism. The 1930s also saw
the emergence of the pragmatic term romantika to characterize those Romantic motifs
which could be deemed acceptable in a Socialist Realist work. The last significant
critical debate relating to Romanticism took place in the 1960s in the form of a
dispute around the rival merits of Lovejoyan pluralism and the more traditional
notions of periodization and movement. The aesthetic details of this debate are less
important than its political implications. It has to be seen within the context of
Khrushchev’s reforming policies: the general relaxation of political control of culture
permitted the ideologically suspect concept of Romanticism to be discussed
more (though not completely) openly, and moreover with some reference to foreign
scholarship.
If we are to draw any lesson from the fluctuations in official perception to which
Russian Romanticism has been subject over the last two hundred years, it is that,
however the concept is defined, it is profoundly ideological in its implications.
Moreover, its ideological content can be construed as conservative or progressive
depending on the regnant political context. Some of Romanticism’s ideological
coloration derives from the political soil in which it was nurtured: national consciousness from eighteenth-century Germany, revolutionary orientation from Revolutionary
France, Byronic individualism from England. At the same time, however, nineteenthcentury Romanticism can be seen as an attempt to address the revealed inadequacies
of eighteenth-century rationalism and by implication the classical aesthetic that
articulated it: a project of ‘‘creative renewal’’ (Furst 1969). This has been traditionally
expressed in terms of an opposition between two movements – Classicism and
Romanticism (the latter ousting the former) – but it is possible, if controversial, to
view Romanticism as the natural heir to Classicism, not merely in terms of a
reinvigoration of artistic tropes, but also in its restoration of an aesthetic which was
essentially elitist, despite the new preoccupations with revolutionary and nationalist
themes.3 The true opponent of Romanticism, according to this view, would indeed be
realism, because in Russia, particularly, it was viewed as a fundamentally democratic
medium with correspondingly distinct resources in language, plot, and characterization. It is certainly true that in the distinctive features of Russian realism – democratization of character (‘‘the little man’’) and setting (the city), mimetic description,
social typicality – one can perceive Romantic aesthetics in reverse. However, it is
equally true that the mimetic principle which underlies realism, and was preached in
its extreme form by Chernyshevskii, limits artistic scope. What we in fact perceive in
the greatest Russian realists is the appropriation of techniques from their Romantic
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predecessors: a unique synthesis of realist mimesis and Romantic psychologism. In
my examination of Romanticism in Lermontov’s works, then, I shall attempt to
emphasize their strong ideological engagement, their protorealism, and the ways in
which the themes they broached passed into the mainstream of Russian literature.
Lermontov: The Semiotics of Romantic Behavior
Lermontov’s life confronts us with a complex instance of behavioral semiotics. On one
level he may be viewed as Russia’s quintessentially Romantic poet, ever in pursuit of
situations which enhanced and projected his Romantic self-image. Among these are
such experiences as love affairs, duels, exile, delight in the exotic, personal unhappiness, and social isolation. In terms of Romanticism’s grand plot, Lermontov may be
said to move from creative precocity (he was writing works of literary significance at
the age of 16), through rebellious nonconformity, to exile and an early, self-predicted
death. However, it is also the case that for Lermontov, as for other Russian literary
contemporaries and successors, the Romantic paradigm was not merely aesthetic but
existential. As a young aristocrat living under the stifling reign of Nicholas I,
Lermontov experienced a very real kind of frustration and lack of fulfillment, and
was in many ways a typical representative of the so-called ‘‘superfluous man’’ produced
by the social and political atmosphere in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth
century. This lent an authenticity to the more personal manifestations of his alienation and a social accuracy to his literary projections of his own condition. Lermontov’s two spells of Caucasian exile (1837 and 1840) likewise represent a sociopolitical
animation of a Romantic topos. The Caucasus, while it could easily be made to
embody Orientalism, exoticism, and Rousseauistic primitiveness, was in Lermontov’s
time, as now, the site of bloody conflict between rival nationalisms, as well as a
religious interface. It was also, along with Siberia, a frequent destination for political
exiles (for Pushkin, for instance, and some of the Decembrists) and Lermontov was
following in this tradition.4 To this extent Lermontov was influenced creatively by
the penal experience which has historically been a prominent inspirational component
of Russian literature both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, if we
include in this poems which reflect his periods of confinement preceding his exile we
will find that a great deal of his creative work falls into this penal ambit. A major
feature of Lermontov’s Romanticism is his struggle to use Romantic forms to reflect
real-life experience. At the same time, though, the stereotypical nature of these forms
resists the representation of real life in mimetic detail, leading at times to the
impressionism which some commentators have detected in his work (Liberman
1983). This aesthetic tension in much of Lermontov’s work reminds us that Romanticism in its later period could be as prescriptive as Classicism, and that in this
context the rise of realism was a creative release.5
In view of what has been said so far, it is probably correct to view Lermontov as
a poet who was progressively politicized by his experiences. However, this was
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essentially a process of accretion rather than supersession. We do indeed find many
poems of a subjective or solipsistic nature early in his career, but later too he
continued to produce such works alongside others which reflected his mature and
politically honed ideology. Typical of the first type of poem is ‘‘The Sail’’ (‘‘Parus,’’
1832) and ‘‘Earth and Heaven’’ (‘‘Zemlia i nebo,’’ 1830-1).6 In ‘‘The Sail’’ the poet
contemplates a solitary white sail out at sea which, functioning as both metonym and
metaphor – steersman and the Romantic self – motivates the hypophoric questioning
which forms the body of the poem: why has the boat left its native shores; what is it
seeking in foreign climes? The paradoxical answer is that it is ‘‘wishing for a storm /
As though in storms to find some peace’’ (I, 488).7 ‘‘Earth and Heaven’’ is more
generalized still, lacking even a pictorial core. Again, however, an initial question is
posed – ‘‘How can we fail to love earth more than heaven?’’ (I, 344) – and answered in
terms of earth’s greater proximity and affinity to humankind. Lermontov was still
writing uncompromisingly subjective Romantic lyrics in his mature period: ‘‘I look at
the future with fear’’ (‘‘Gliazhu na budushchnost’ s boiazn’iu,’’ 1838) and the wellknown ‘‘It is tedious and sad’’ (‘‘I skuchno i grustno,’’ 1840). Lyrics such as these are
striking for their lack of defined sociopolitical context, but this is not Romanticism
by default: closer structural scrutiny of such works shows an engagement with the
Kantian premises which underlay the Romantic worldview, in particular the conceptualization of time and space as conditions rather than objects of cognition.
Lermontov’s Romantic Symbolism
Apart from these overarching Romantic preoccupations, we can also detect in Lermontov’s oeuvre recurrent symbols and motifs which exemplify not only his own
personalization of the Romantic repertory, but also a technique which would be
developed more fully by Blok and the Symbolists some 60 years later: the use of
semantically rich images as points of convergence for complex abstractions. Thus the
dagger features in several poems as a polysemantic image capable of drawing together
otherwise disparate subjects into the poet’s creative ambit. In ‘‘The Dagger’’ (‘‘Kinzhal,’’ 1838) the dagger’s provenance and ownership are carefully detailed: ‘‘A brooding Georgian forged you for revenge, / A free Circassian whetted you for fearful
battle’’ (I, 38). Now it belongs to the poet, having been given to him as a valedictory
love token: ‘‘I received you from a lily-white hand / For remembrance, at the moment
of parting . . . ’’ (I, 38). Georgian, Circassian, and Russian, the chief ethnic participants
in the Caucasian drama of Lermontov’s time, are here inferentially inducted into a
poem which is ostensibly an Orientalized love lyric. In ‘‘Your heavenly gaze gleams /
Like blue enamel’’ (‘‘Kak nebesa, tvoi vzor blistaet,’’ 1838) the lyric hero’s infatuation
is such that ‘‘For a single sound of your magic voice, / For a single glance / I am ready
to part with my Sech’s pride, / My Georgian dagger’’ (I, 41). Dagger and woman here
confront the hero with an either/or of masculinity, found elsewhere in Lermontov: the
choice between love and warfare. ‘‘The Dagger’’ also broaches this dilemma via
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secondary symbolism: the poet receives the parting gift from his beloved and ‘‘For the
first time it was not blood which dripped from you [the dagger] / but a bright tear – a
pearl of suffering’’ (I, 38). These two images are suggestive of a conflict widely
addressed by Lermontov in his works with an explicitly Caucasian setting: the
disjunction between feelings and passion, particularly in the form of human weakness,
and the uncompromising demands of an authoritarian martial ethos. In ‘‘Your
heavenly gaze gleams’’ reference to the Sech – a fortified Cossack encampment –
identifies the lyric voice as that of a Cossack, a member of the most ambiguous
socioethnic group of the region, synonymous with professional militarism, and
paradoxically representative both of assimilation (to many of the Asiatic mores of
the region) and of Russian imperial expansion (staunch Orthodoxy, loyalty to the
Tsar).
‘‘The Poet’’ (‘‘Poet,’’ 1838) represents Lermontov’s fullest exploitation of the
symbolic potential of the dagger image. Here the dagger itself is made to embody
two extremes: the violent and heroic activity for which it was made and later an
enforced and shameful idleness. First used by a Caucasian tribesman, it passed to the
Cossack who killed him and thence to an Armenian shopkeeper in whose care it
languished until bought by the poet and hung, for decoration, on his wall where ‘‘It
gleams like a golden toy. . . / Alas, inglorious and innocuous . . . ’’ (I, 48). In this poem
the dagger becomes an eloquent symbol of decadence and disempowerment, the more
so because the weapon itself is shown to possess no inherent virtues: fate and
circumstance determine whether it will be put to its designated use, lie idle, or
become a mere ornament, and indeed the poem effectively emplots the dagger’s fall
into indignity. Rather as an afterthought, Lermontov uses the rest of the poem to
explicate his image in terms of the supine condition of the modern poet (‘‘In our
pampered age, poet, have you not also / Lost your avocation . . . ?’’ I, 49) and while this
part of the text is relevant to Lermontov’s view of the role of the artist, it is the dagger
itself which most clearly defines the parameters of Lermontov’s creative world.
Lermontov transforms a Romantic prop into the metonymic focalizer for a series of
ideologically fraught topoi: the Caucasus and its multiethnicity; Russia’s role in the
region; primitive notions of martial valor in Romantic theory and imperial practice;
the impossibility of an autonomous, individual ethos unfettered by social determinants.8
The natural world also supplies Lermontov with recurrent symbols which he
invests with anthropomorphic connotations similar to those of the dagger. Leaves
and trees, while they may be found throughout his work as an inevitable descriptive
backdrop, are foregrounded in certain works to particular effect. In some poems, for
instance ‘‘The Reed’’ (‘‘Trostnik,’’ 1832), this manifests itself in an orthodoxly
Romantic use of pastoral and folkloric motifs. In ‘‘The Reed’’ a fisherman makes a
pipe out of a reed beneath which, unbeknown to him, a young maiden has been
buried. Her lamenting voice speaks out when he plays the pipe. The ballad also
contains the stock folk motifs of the cruel stepmother and the treacherous – in this
case murderous – lover. ‘‘The Leaf’’ (‘‘Listok,’’ 1841) too conforms to established
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Romantic repertory, but displays Lermontov’s characteristic focalizing technique: a
leaf torn from an oak tree is blown aimlessly about the steppe until it lodges against
the root of a plane tree where it seeks shelter. The leaf’s description of itself
figuratively represents the rootless protagonist found in a number of Lermontov’s
works: ‘‘I have matured too early and grown up in a harsh country. . . / Alone and
aimless I have long wandered the earth, / I have withered for want of shade; sleepless
and without rest have I wilted./ Take this stranger into your leaves of emerald green, /
I have a fund of strange and wonderful stories’’ (I, 124). The leaf’s overtures are
rejected by the plane tree, whose reply also reinforces the theme of society’s rejection
of the poet: ‘‘You have seen much – but why do I need your stories? / Even the birds of
paradise itself are tedious to me’’ (I, 124). Though the poem lacks clear geographical
parameters, the trees are subtly chosen: the oak (masculine in Russian) suggesting
Russia and the North, the feminine plane tree (as evinced by Lermontov’s frequent use
of it in this regional context) the Caucasus and the South. Thus while as Andronikov
(I, 597) suggests ‘‘The image of the storm-driven leaf is a widespread symbol of the
fate of the political exile’’ (in Russian and European literature of the Romantic
period), Lermontov biases the poem gently in the direction of his own situation,
exiled to the Caucasus for the second time, and the plane tree itself can be read
additionally as an emblem of the region (‘‘Move on wanderer! I know you not! / I am
loved by the sun, for him I flower, for him I shine,’’ I, 125). The juxtaposition of
natural beauty to individual suffering, and the indifference of the former to the latter,
were themes intensified by Lermontov’s sojourns in the Caucasus, and they feature
prominently in his mature narrative works The Demon (Demon, 1839), The Novice
(Mtsyri, 1839), and A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840) in all of which
individual tragedy is played out against a stunning Caucasian landscape.
Other poems which employ tree or leaf symbolism also exploit exotic provenance: a
desiccated piece of palm brought back from the Holy Land is the occasion for
religious musings in ‘‘The Branch from Palestine’’ (‘‘Vetka Palestiny,’’ 1837); In
‘‘Three Palms’’ (‘‘Tri pal’my,’’ 1839) a group of Arabian nomads cut down three
isolated palms and thus destroy a tiny desert oasis. The common setting suggests
the Middle East as a location for primal moral events which are fundamental to
Lermontov’s philosophical and religious views. The principle of symbolic focalization
is found in a range of other forms too. Rocks, mountains, and rivers are made to
perform this function and several of them make explicit reference to the Caucasus:
‘‘The Cross on the Rock’’ (‘‘Krest na skale,’’ 1839), ‘‘Hurrying to the North from afar’’
(‘‘Spesha na sever iz daleka,’’ 1837), ‘‘The Terek’s Gifts’’ (‘‘Dary Tereka,’’ 1839), ‘‘The
Argument’’ (‘‘Spor,’’ 1841). While we can find examples of these same natural features
not topographized in this way (‘‘The Cliff’’ [‘‘Utes,’’ 1841], for instance) it is precisely
this investment of traditional Romantic staples with Lermontov’s real-life experience
which gives the majority of them their force and uniqueness. Key here is an early
work – ‘‘The Caucasus’’ (‘‘Kavkaz,’’ 1830) – written when Lermontov was 16, recalling
his first visit to the Caucasus as a boy: ‘‘Though early separated from you by fate, / O
southern mountains / You need only be seen once to be eternally remembered / Like a
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sweet song from one’s homeland / I love the Caucasus . . . I was happy with your
mountain ravines; / Five years have passed and still I pine . . . ’’ (I, 202). This primal
insight evolves into ever more complex forms throughout Lermontov’s life under the
experiential impact of the region to which he would be twice exiled, serve as a
frontline soldier, and die in a duel.
Thus far we have dealt with texts which, while identifiably belonging to the
Romantic repertory, are subtly infused with references to Lermontov’s life and
experience. We now move on to examine three sources of cultural influence on the
poet which together illustrate the degree to which Lermontov was both receptive to
the broader themes of Romantic culture and creatively resourceful enough to resist
enslavement by them. The first of these relates to Lermontov’s special relationship to
Scotland; the others to the impact on him of two major figures of the Romantic
period: Byron and Pushkin.
The Scottish Dimension
Lermontov was of Scottish ancestry. His forebear, George Learmonth, originally from
Fife, was a Scottish mercenary serving with the Polish army who was captured by the
Russians in 1613, changed sides, settled in Russia and received a grant of land and
gentry status for his military service to the state. Lermontov knew his family history
and would have read the ballad Thomas the Rhymer in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border and the copious scholarly notes which Scott provides about its author/hero
Thomas Learmonth – ‘‘The Rhymer.’’ Thomas Learmonth was the semilegendary
progenitor of Lermontov’s family, a bard and soothsayer and, according to some
accounts, a supporter of William Wallace. Scott, and Scottish Romanticism more
generally, played a powerful role in determining Russian literary consciousness in the
first half of the nineteenth century. As a geographical and cultural interface between
ancient (Highland) and modern (Lowland) values Scotland had clear affinities with
the Caucasus of Pushkin, Marlinskii, and Lermontov himself. There are a number of
Scottish echoes in Lermontov and two youthful poems which seem to be inspired
directly by his Scottish descent: ‘‘Ossian’s Grave’’ (‘‘Grob Ossiana,’’ 1830) and ‘‘Longing’’ (‘‘Zhelanie,’’ 1831). In the first of these, only eight lines long, the poet’s
imagination transports him to Ossian’s grave. The poem is double-layered: it is a
homage to Scotland, a Northern homeland for Romantic poets, but also the personal
homeland of a Lermontov, exiled from : ‘‘ . . . the hills of my Scotland’’ (I, 247).
Equally however, there is no concrete basis for the poet’s musings: since Ossian
himself is a fictional creation he can have no grave, and its imaginary location ‘‘in
the steppe’’ underlines Lermontov’s ignorance of Scottish geography. Even so the
poem has a totemic flavor to it: the poet wishes to ‘‘breathe his native breezes’’ and
‘‘live afresh’’ in Scotland (I, 247).
‘‘Longing’’ has a broadly similar theme but is related far more specifically to
Lermontov’s own ancestry. In it we can detect the influence of Scott’s own sequel to
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Thomas the Rhymer which he included, along with the ballad itself, in Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border. Scott describes Thomas Learmonth, the Rhymer, feasting, reciting, and
harping for his noble guests ‘‘In Learmonth’s high and ancient hall’’ (Scott 1932: 128).
It is to this ancestral seat, now crumbling and empty, that Lermontov imagines
himself returning, in the form of a raven. Common to both Scott’s ballad and
Lermontov’s poem is the image of the bardic harp. In Scott’s ballad, Thomas, aware
that he must depart for Elfland, cuts short his recitation: ‘‘There paused the harp; its
lingering sound / Died slowly on the ear . . . ’’ (Scott 1932: 132). And as he departs,
‘‘the dying accents’’ of the harp, hanging round his neck, sound in the wind. In his
imaginary visitation Lermontov imagines himself touching a Scottish harp in the
deserted castle: ‘‘The sound would soar about the vaulted ceiling; / I would listen
alone, and awoken alone, / It would fall silent as suddenly as it had sounded’’ (I, 368).
The harp, symbol of Thomas Learmonth’s bardic inspiration, is recovered by his
Russian descendant. Just as Learmonth’s departure is marked by the aeolian plaint
of his harp strings, so Lermontov, returning to his hereditary castle in the guise of a
raven, reanimates the harp with a brush of his wing: an occult return to match an
occult departure. However, where Scott has Thomas Learmonth’s harp play to an
audience, Lermontov offers a solipsistic semiotics: both the harp and its player are
alone. It is a purely personal encounter with his poetical forebear, or rather with an
aspect of his forebear with which he identifies. Thomas Learmonth was also, according
to tradition, an aristocrat and a soldier, the originator of a martial family tradition
which survived transplantation to Russia: Lermontov therefore styles himself ‘‘The
last descendant of bold warriors’’ (I, 369). Though these Scottish motifs in Lermontov’s work are sparse they are highly significant and confirm a specific pattern of
alienation and affiliation in the writer’s socioethnic consciousness. In one sense
Lermontov appeals to his distant Scottish descent as a way of emphasizing his
Romantic alienation from Russian society. In another, however, his family myth
serves to underline his Russianness since it is a story of his family’s honorable
acclimatization over two hundred years: Lermontov is a Russian aristocrat and soldier
and to that extent unavoidably of the establishment. Even so, the ‘‘Russian / not
Russian’’ binary is fundamental to Lermontov’s creative consciousness and manifests
itself also in his feelings about the Caucasus and his attitude to Western cultural
influences. Of the latter the most significant is that of Byron.
Romantic Influences: Byron and Pushkin
Both Pushkin and Lermontov were keenly aware of Byronism in the sense of a lived
experience as much as a literary style: Pushkin famously characterizes the dandified
hero of Eugene Onegin as ‘‘a Childe Harold in a Muscovite’s cloak’’ (Eugene Onegin
ch. VII, stanza 24). However it was Lermontov rather than Pushkin whom literary
history has come to regard as the embodiment of the Byronic. It can be argued that
Byron’s work was the single most significant influence on Lermontov’s poetry;
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alternatively, however, Pushkin can be seen in this role, although many of his works
too, particularly those with southern themes, are themselves influenced by Byron.
Two of Lermontov’s early poems offer apparently contradictory insights into the poet’s
own view of his relationship to Byron. At first glance the earlier of them (‘‘K . . . ’’
[‘‘To . . . ,’’ 1830]) seems to suggest the young poet’s desire to closely emulate his elder,
while the later and better known one (‘‘No, I am not Byron, but another’’ [‘‘Net, ia ne
Bairon, ia drugoi,’’ 1832]) appears to reject any identification. However in the first
poem Byron is introduced only in the second verse by way of a prolonged illustration
of why the reader should not ‘‘sympathize [with the poet], / Although my words are
for the moment sad . . . ’’ (I, 255). Byron is made to exemplify, perhaps ideally, the
complex of emotional and moral attitudes which the poet attributes to himself. The
second poem begins with a forthright rejection of identification with Byron, and
moves on, by way of a brief concessive statement (‘‘Like him I am a wanderer pursued
by the world,’’ I, 459) to an enumeration of the principal differentia: (1) unlike Byron
I have a ‘‘Russian soul’’; (2) I have a different destiny (‘‘I started earlier and I will finish
sooner; / My mind will not accomplish much,’’ I, 459). The concessive statement can
be seen as a compression of the Byronic qualities explicated in the first poem, so that
to some extent it is superseded by the second. Moreover the structure of the second
poem inverts that of its predecessor: whereas the latter talks briefly about Lermontov
and moves on to Byron; the former soon puts Byron aside in favor of the poet
himself.9 What is important, however, is that in neither of these poems is there any
hint of artistic debt to Byron. Instead what is stressed is the poet’s uncompromising
individualism in the face of a hostile society. It is this typically Russian adaptation of
a Western idea to native conditions which explains the attraction of Byron for
Lermontov and his contemporaries.10 In fact by far the most interesting section of
‘‘I am not Byron . . . ’’ is the poet’s own enigmatic characterization of himself with
which the poem concludes: ‘‘Who will tell my thoughts to the crowd?’’ (I, 459). This
links him closely to another powerful influence for whom this theme was a constant
preoccupation – Alexander Pushkin.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Pushkin’s significance for
Lermontov. Pushkin was at the height of his creative powers when Lermontov
began to write and, although the older poet was far less wedded to Romanticism
than his successor, Pushkin’s evocations of the Caucasus, as well as his concept of the
status and avocation of the poet become subjects of central importance for Lermontov.
When Pushkin was killed in a duel in 1837 Lermontov effectively declared himself
his heir by immediately writing and circulating ‘‘The Death of a Poet’’ (‘‘Smert’
poeta’’), a poem expressing outrage at Pushkin’s death. Pushkin’s fatal duel with
Georges Danthès, the adopted son of the Dutch Ambassador in St Petersburg, was
ostensibly about the latter’s pursuit of Pushkin’s wife, but it was widely felt that
Pushkin had been hounded to his death by a vindictive and unsympathetic establishment.11 By this time Pushkin was no longer at the height of his popularity, and was
obliged to occupy a demeaning palace sinecure by a suspicious Tsar who personally
vetted his literary work. He was the embodiment of the alienated poet described in
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his own verse (‘‘The Poet and the Crowd’’ [‘‘Poet i tolpa,’’ 1828]), a theme which also
appealed to Lermontov. Thus a European Romantic stereotype became tragic reality
on Russian soil: thousands of common people attended the funeral of the poet who, as
Lermontov puts it in ‘‘Death of a Poet’’: ‘‘Rose up against society’s opinions, / Alone,
as ever . . . and was killed’’ (I, 21). This ideological commitment to art – whereby a
poet’s death in a duel becomes a significant political event – is characteristically
Russian and is explicable by various historical and cultural factors. It is certain,
however, that Romanticism’s stress on the special calling of the artist was an
important catalyst in determining Russian attitudes to writers and writing during
the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth.
As well as its political import ‘‘The Death of a Poet’’ sets the keynote for
Lermontov’s view of poetical inspiration. In Pushkin Lermontov believed he had
witnessed the poet/crowd opposition, the pedigree of which goes back to Horace
(‘‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo . . . ’’) enacted in its most extreme form: ‘‘And
removing his wonted crown – they placed a crown of thorns on him / With laurels
intertwined: / But the secret spines cruelly / Tormented his glorious head’’ (I, 22).12
Elsewhere in Lermontov we will find this motif repeated: the poet’s divine gifts are
superfluous or ridiculed by the ignorant multitude (in ‘‘The Poet’’ for instance). In
part we can attribute this to an innate aristocratism which Lermontov shared with
Pushkin: the inflammatory last verse of ‘‘Death of a Poet’’ is merely an explicit
reformulation of an idea implied by Pushkin himself in poems like The Bronze
Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik, 1834) and ‘‘My Genealogy’’ (‘‘Moia rodoslovnaia,’’ 1830):
that his own kind, the ancient hereditary gentry, had been eclipsed by vulgar upstarts
whose parents were ennobled for their political support by Catherine the Great.
These, writes Lermontov, in ‘‘Death of a Poet’’: ‘‘Surround the throne in a rabid
crowd, / The executioners of freedom, Genius and Glory’’ (I, 23). Equally, however,
this outlook defines the limits, and signals the twilight of Romanticism in Russia.
The personal isolation which becomes so frequent a refrain in the later Lermontov,
while formulating itself in terms of the futility of verbal communication and the
dangers of frank self-expression, conceals beneath it the loss of a socially and culturally
sympathetic addressee. Works by Lermontov which particularly exhibit this are ‘‘No,
I am not Byron’’ (the two last lines), ‘‘There are words / With dark meaning . . . ’’ (‘‘Est’
rechi- znachen’e / Temno . . . ,’’ 1840), ‘‘Do not trust, do not trust yourself, young
dreamer’’ (‘‘Ne ver’, ne ver’ sebe, mechtatel’ molodoi,’’ 1839); and one can also find the
same idea expressed in The Novice: ‘‘Can one narrate one’s soul’’ (II, 53) and Pechorin’s
description of his youth in Princess Mary, one of the story-chapters in A Hero of Our
Time (‘‘Fearing ridicule, I buried my best feelings in the depths of my heart and there
they died,’’ IV, 89).
The most explicit elaboration of this theme by Lermontov is in his ‘‘Journalist,
Reader and Writer’’ (‘‘Zhurnalist, chitatel’ i pisatel’,’’ 1840), a short dramatic poem
written, significantly, while Lermontov was under arrest following his duel with the
son of the French Ambassador for which he was soon to be exiled. A poet (the
‘‘writer’’) is sick and is being visited by a literary critic (the ‘‘journalist’’) and a
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member of the reading public (the ‘‘reader’’). In the journalist’s view, the writer’s
sickness is a boon because it keeps him from social distractions which are inimical to
‘‘mature creation’’: whereas misfortune, which includes ‘‘exile and confinement’’
(Lermontov’s current vicissitudes) will produce ‘‘a sweet song’’ (I, 77-8). The writer,
however, confesses that his present condition has not produced the desired effect: he
has nothing to write because all the traditional (Romantic) topics are written out:
‘‘What is there to write about? The East and South / Have been dealt with long ago; /
Abusing the crowd has been tried by every poet; They’ve all praised married life,
/ Soared in spirit heavenwards, / Prayed silently / To an unknown beauty / And bored
everyone to tears’’ (I, 78). The reader has his turn next. He initially gives the
impression of a philistine whose first concern is for the physical appearance of literary
journals and their abundance of misprints. He dismisses contemporary poetry as
rubbish, while prose, if it is not translation, consists of short stories which ‘‘Make
fun of Moscow / And denigrate civil servants. / On whom do they base these portraits?
/ Where do they hear these dialogues? And even if they have heard them / We don’t
want to . . . ’’ (I, 79). In conclusion, however, he wonders when ‘‘barren Russia’’ will
cast aside ‘‘false tinsel’’: ‘‘When will thought find simple language? / When will
passions find a noble voice?’’ (I, 79). There then follows an exchange about literary
criticism between the reader and the journalist and both conclude by lamenting the
nonproductiveness of the ‘‘sick’’ writer, thus giving him the pretext for a concluding
riposte.
The writer describes two kinds of inspiration to which he is subject, both recognizably within the paradigm of Romantic creativity: the first joyful and ecstatic; the
second bitter and full of regret. He declines to show the products of either kind of
creative process to the public – for fear of ridicule in the first instance and, in the
second, of disturbing the reader and exciting censure. ‘‘Tell me,’’ he begs, ‘‘What shall
I write?’’ (I, 82). The writer’s confession of his creative solipsism is the culminating
moment in the threefold debate between the principal agents in the text-producing
process and asserts the primacy of authorship in that process. At the same time the
device of the writer’s ‘‘illness’’ deconstructs itself on closer examination: ironically, the
writer’s description of his own creative block, of his nonproduction of text, is itself a
text, in a distinctly Romantic idiom, delivered by a lyric voice which nevertheless
asks in desperation ‘‘Tell me, what shall I write?’’ It is the reader who inadvertently
supplies the answer and also provides a clue to the direction Russian literature will
take (though he himself would clearly not approve of it) when he alludes to literature
which denigrates civil servants. Six years later Dostoevskii makes the civil service
clerk Devushkin (in Poor Folk) take similar umbrage on reading what he believes to be
a portrait of himself in the clerical protagonist of Gogol’s great realist landmark The
Overcoat: ‘‘And what is the point of writing things like that? What use do they
serve? . . . one’s entire public and private life is held up for inspection in the form of
literature . . . it will be impossible for me to go out on the street . . . everything has
been described in such detail that I will now be instantly recognized by my walk
alone’’ (Dostoyevsky 1988: 68). Of course Romanticism had traditionally held up the
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poet’s ‘‘entire public and private life’’ for inspection; the outraged reaction of a reader
compelled to identify an unflattering fictional creation with himself is something new
and symptomatic of the mimetic and socially typifying techniques of the new critical
realism.
The Major Narrative Works: The Demon, The Novice, and A Hero
of Our Time
Lermontov’s reputation by no means rests solely on his lyric poetry. He wrote
narrative poems – including The Demon and The Novice – both set in the Caucasus.
His novel, A Hero of Our Time, was one of the classic texts (the others being Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin and Gogol’s Dead Souls) which laid out the creative parameters for the
great novelists of the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is to these narrative
works, produced late in Lermontov’s short career, that we now turn: these are the texts
in which Lermontov most clearly confronts, and ultimately transcends, the problematics of Romanticism.
The Demon and The Novice explore in narrative form many of the preoccupations
broached severally by the lyrics. The Novice is based on the true story of a Circassian
boy captured by Russian soldiers in a raid on a mountain village and handed into the
care of Georgian monks. In Lermontov’s poem the boy, preparing for holy orders,
escapes from the remote Georgian monastery under cover of a thunderstorm and
attempts to return to his home in the distant hills which he can see from his
monastery cell. After vainly wandering for three days, in the course of which he is
mauled by a mountain lion, he ends up where he started and dies after telling the
story of his escape to an old monk by way of confession. In one sense the poem is
quintessentially Romantic: the young escapee attempts to assert his identity, only to
become tragically disoriented. There is a vain attempt by the exile to recover his true
home, and nature is encountered as a sublime mixture of beauty, indifference, and
danger. On closer scrutiny, however, we discover, as so often in Lermontov’s works, a
political subtext for which the Romantic sujet is a convenient vehicle. The triangulation of Russian, Circassian, and Georgian cultures locates the tale on the fault line of
the Russian imperium, precisely the position occupied by Lermontov himself in the
latter part of his life. The forcible abduction of a Muslim (Circassian) child to a
Christian country (Georgia) and his subsequent induction into the holy orders of an
alien religion is a potent metaphor of imperial intervention. The poem also plays in an
original way with the traditional Romantic binary opposition of civilization/savagery
and culture/nature. The novice finds himself unable to survive in the world outside
the monastery walls precisely because of the success with which he has acclimatized
himself to the monastic life. His cherished dream of returning to his homeland is
utterly inefficacious against environmental reality. There are no hereditary advantages
to be drawn upon in his struggle with the harsh mountainous landscape and natural
hazards; indeed in lines later excised by Lermontov the novice in his delirium
Lermontov
321
imagines a Circassian war party riding past him: ‘‘With a wild whistle, like a storm, /
They rushed by close to me. / And each one, leaning over from his mount, / Threw a
scornful glance / At my monkish garb . . . ? I could scarcely breathe, tormented by
shame’’ (II, 563).
Lermontov seems here to be problematizing ethnicity and, in his insistence on the
role of environment in determining character, is, despite the Romantic idiom,
anticipative of realist assumptions: the hero is estranged both from his racial origins
and from the natural world, two key areas of engagement for Romantic aesthetics.
Most significant, however, is the poem’s Russocentricity. Russian ethnicity, while not
represented explicitly in the poem, is all the more powerful for its being embedded in
its semiotic mechanisms. The introductory stanza of the poem describes the monastery and its graveyard: the gravestones tell ‘‘Of past glory and of / A King, weary of his
crown / Who in a certain year / Entrusted his people to Russia. / And God’s blessing
descended / On Georgia! She has flourished / Ever since . . . / Not fearing enemies /
From beyond the friendly bayonets’’ (II, 52). This is the hegemonic context of the
poem and one in which Russian writer and Russian reader would broadly concur. It is
reminiscent of Pushkin’s odic celebration of Peter the Great’s metropolis in The Bronze
Horseman as an ironic prelude to describing the wretched story of one of its humble
inhabitants. In both poems two distinct forms of discourse embody two competing
perspectives on Russian reality: the autocratic and the democratic; the imperial and
the autochthonous.
It is this sensitivity to the ethno-imperial interface which identifies The Novice as
close in theme and ideology to the culminating work of Lermontov’s career, the novel
A Hero of Our Time. Yet it is his narrative poem The Demon which is most often cited as
the novel’s direct precursor.13 This is because the hero of The Demon can be shown to
have an obvious affinity with the hero of the novel, who also possesses, if only
figuratively, a ‘‘demonic’’ character. The Demon, however, was a long-term project of
Lermontov’s, first drafted at a time when he was still very much in thrall to Romantic
paradigms. Even so the seven successive redraftings of the poem produced a work
which managed, on a philosophical level, to address the moral dilemmas of the postKantian universe, while at the same time functioning as an allegory of the Russian
imperial condition. Significantly, it is the Romantic impressionism of The Demon
which enables it to sustain these different layers of meaning. Indeed an examination of
the successive drafts shows a move away from, rather than towards, greater concretization of the hero and his motivations. Lermontov’s critique of Kantianism uses the
Demon figure much as it was used by Laplace, and before him Descartes, as a kind of
extreme instance of human consciousness. Kantian ethics rests on the universalization
of individual moral obligation, but what if we imagine an individual who is either
wholly evil or, as in the case of the Demon, one whose God-ordained obligation is ‘‘to
sow evil’’ (II, 85)? The Demon also debates a related topic: the rival merits of
voluntarism, and consequentialism as mainsprings of human behavior. It is thus
very much a philosophical work – more so perhaps than any other by Lermontov –
but equally one which evinces considerable skepticism about some of the fundamental
322
Robert Reid
assumptions of Romantic axiology. Thematically The Demon owes a good deal to
Miltonic and Byronic sources as well as to Goethe and Vigny. The Demon (it is never
made clear whether he is the Devil or a devil) joylessly wanders the world spreading
evil, until he catches sight of a young Georgian woman on the eve of her wedding. He
falls in love with her and there instantly rekindles in him a longing to recover the
paradise he has lost. Having engineered the death of her bridegroom, he persistently
woos her, pursuing her even into the convent where she has attempted to take refuge
from his visitations. When she dies in his fiery embrace an angel intervenes to pilot
her soul to heaven, leaving the Demon to continue his hopeless wanderings.
A line of criticism particularly favored by Soviet critics interpreted this plot both as
an allegory of Lermontov’s own experiences and, more broadly, those of his generation:
young highly educated aristocrats who felt themselves progressively marginalized in
the Russia of Nicholas I, who, after the Decembrist revolt of 1825, came to mistrust
the aristocratic elite to which its instigators belonged, preferring instead to govern
through bureaucratic institutions. Lermontov has traditionally been thought to
epitomize the embittered, disillusioned young ‘‘superfluous man’’ of this era and it
is certainly possible to trace the psychological contours of this type beneath the
Romantic representation of the poem’s protagonist. The damnation of the Demon
by an implacable God can be seen as a figurative representation of the relationship
between subject and autocrat; the longing for a pre-Fall state is nostalgia for the
former relationship between Tsar and aristocrat; the reconnection with things earthly
which the Demon’s love for the heroine briefly resurrects is the possibility of an
authentic social existence which political conditions deny, and the coupling of the
Caucasian context with the theme of exile suggests Lermontov’s own inscription into
the plot. Interpreted in this way The Demon confirms a use of Romantic aesthetics
with which we are by now familiar: pre-existing Romantic paradigms are subtly
infused with ideological and political parallelism – Romantic exile with real political
exile, divine proscription with royal proscription.
Despite the undoubted ideological efficacy of this aesthetic, the culminating
achievement of Lermontov’s literary career – A Hero of Our Time – suggests that it
was ultimately unable to fully articulate the social, political, and cultural issues which
faced Russia towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Albeit in oversimplified
terms, we may say that A Hero of Our Time is a realist novel produced by a writer whose
literary and personal career were quintessentially Romantic. In effect Lermontov
achieves with the novel a kind of Copernican inversion of the creative processes
which we have examined so far. Instead of realist subtextual content beneath an
overtly Romantic form, we have an innovative use of a variety of structural devices
to give the vivid illusion of reality. (One early translator of the novel thought that it
was a documentary account of military life in the Caucasus, rather than a work of
fiction.) However, on closer inspection the novel preserves many important Romantic
motifs. The novel consists of five chapters, interlinking stories which chronicle the
exploits of a young army officer, Grigorii Pechorin, who has been posted to the
Caucasus, probably for some misdemeanor. Three of the constituent stories purport to
Lermontov
323
be extracts from Pechorin’s journal; of the other two one is an account by the fictitious
editor of Pechorin’s journal of his acquisition of it while traveling in the Caucasus
(including his brief meeting with Pechorin himself); the other is an oral account of
one of Pechorin’s exploits collected by the editor from an army officer who knew him.
The realism of the work is enhanced by the plurality of narrative voices and by the
apparently disparate agendas of the narrators themselves. The editor is concerned
mainly to record the scenery and customs of the Caucasus; the army officer who tells
him about Pechorin is largely motivated by his admiration for Pechorin’s exploits and
baffled fascination with his unfathomable character. The overall and avowed purpose
of the novel is to explicate the enigmatic psychology of the hero by approaching it
from a variety of perspectives. One of these, of course, is the hero’s own and in the
three stories narrated by himself he emerges as a disillusioned, cynical, and manipulative figure, whose antisocial machinations bring heartbreak and sometimes death to
those with whom he comes into contact. In this sense he can be seen as a realist
incarnation of the Romantic Demon and more generally as a kind of narrative
concretization of the fragmented Byronic lyric hero present throughout Lermontov’s
poetry.14
Despite Lermontov’s attempts to objectivize Pechorin, reviewers were quick to
identify the novel as a self-portrait. Stung by this interpretation Lermontov wrote a
Preface to its second edition in which he sought to explain his purpose. He argued
that Pechorin was not the portrait of a single man but of the vices of a whole
generation in their extreme form. Of course, his justification here is not dissimilar
in intention from his poem of some years before, dissociating himself from Byron. It
was a plea for his hero (in the earlier case his lyric hero) to be considered objectively
rather than subjectively: as a social portrait rather than a personal portrait. It is a plea
in effect for Realism: for the acceptance of the fictional protagonist as typologically
valid.
In A Hero of Our Time Lermontov attempted to estrange or lay bare the traditions of
Romantic plot and psychology, while not dissociating himself from their existential
validity. Had he survived, he might well have passed effortlessly into the developing
mainstream of Russian realism. Instead he bequeathed to a still young literature a
novel which was both influential and contradictory. Successive writers held it up as
the benchmark for realistic multifaceted psychological portrayal. At the same time,
along with other works by Pushkin and Gogol, it was in part responsible for
preserving and developing Romantic motifs in the characterization techniques
employed by subsequent generations of realist novelists.15 Indeed one can say that
it is this Romantic core which is the defining feature of Russian realism; and that,
however paradoxically, Russia’s greatest exponent of Romanticism was one of the
principal founders of Russian realism.
324
Robert Reid
Notes
1 On this see Lanu (2001: 48ff).
2 Even so it is not correct to characterize Russian
Romanticism as inherently ‘‘conservative’’ or
to assume that ‘‘Russianness’’ was invariably a
conservative theme as is sometimes implied.
See Cranston (1994: 142).
3 See the discussion of D. S. Likhachev’s theory
of periodization in Weststeijn (2004).
4 Exile, particularly in a Romanticized form, is a
key component of the traditional Russian
image of the Caucasus, since Romantic writers
who had undergone that experience were
largely responsible for creating the image.
On this see Ram (1995).
5 Interestingly Lermontov’s poetical language
can be shown to move progressively away
from the conventional archaisms favored by
his immediate predecessors towards linguistic
forms more in line with the standard speech of
his time. See Motina (1997).
6 Transliteration of the titles of Lermontov’s
works uses the Library of Congress system
without diacritics. Wherever possible conventional translations of titles and first lines have
been used. Where there is no conventional
version, I have aimed at literal accuracy.
7 All translations are my own unless otherwise
stated. References are to the Andronikov and
Oksman (1964) four-volume edition of Lermontov’s works by volume and page.
8 Not all commentators would necessarily endorse the case for Lermontov’s broadly ideological use of symbols. Smirnov, for instance,
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
stresses their Romantic expressionism: as an
artist Lermontov expresses himself ‘‘not via
the direct articulation of his thoughts, but
through aspects of the external form of the
symbol’’ (Smirnov 1989: 7).
Andronikov (1964, I: 360) speculates that
the poem is a riposte to comparisons of the
poet with Byron, which were current among
his circle.
On this see Kuhiwczak (1997).
Lermontov’s poem was the first among many
verse commemorations. For a discussion of
these see Fedorov (1964). See also Tynianov
and Nikitina (1964).
For a full analysis of this aspect of the poem
see Nedzvetskii (1972).
For a comparison of The Demon and The Novice
see Lotman (1997: 61-9).
A compatible Bakhtinian view of the transition described here stresses Lermontov’s increasing emphasis on dialogism. See Waszink
(1993).
All of Lermontov’s narrative protagonists –
the novice, the Demon, and Pechorin – embody the conflict between strong personal
autonomy and a restraining external or
higher force which is a recurrent feature of
Romantic characterization. (On this see Mart’ianova 1997.) Arguably this is the fundamental psychological predicament which
Romanticism bequeaths to later writers like
Dostoevskii and Tolstoy.
References and Further Reading
Andronikov, I. L. and Oksman, Iu. G. (eds).
(1964). Lermontov, M. Iu. Sobranie sochinenii v
chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura.
Cranston, M. (1994). The Romantic Movement. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dostoyevsky, F. (1988). Poor Folk, trans. David
McDuff. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Federov, A. (1964). ‘‘Smert’ poeta sredi drugikh
otlikov na gibel’ Pushkina.’’ Russkaia literatura,
VII (3): 32-45.
Furst, L. (1969). Romanticism in Perspective. London: Macmillan.
Fusso, S. (1998). ‘‘The Romantic Tradition.’’ In M.
V. Jones and R. Feuer Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel.
Lermontov
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 171-89.
Golstein, V. (1998). Lermontov’s Narratives of Heroism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Kelly, L. (1977). Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus.
London: Constable.
Kuhiwczak, P. (1997). ‘‘Translation and National
Canons: Slav Perceptions of English Romanticism.’’ Essays and Studies, 50: 80-94.
Lanu, A. (2001). ‘‘Formirovanie literaturnogo
kanona russkogo romantizma: Na materiale
uchebnikov i istorii literatury (1822-62).’’
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 51: 35-67.
Liberman, A. (1983). Mikhail Lermontov: Major
Poetical Works. London and Canberra: Croom
Helm.
Lotman, Iu. (1997). O russkoi literature: Stat’i i
issledovaniia (1958-1993). St Petersburg:
Iskusstvo-SPB.
Lovejoy, A. O. ([1924] 1948). ‘‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.’’ In Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, pp. 228-53.
Mart’ianova, S. A. (1997). ‘‘Personazhi russkoi
klassiki I khristianskaia antropologiia.’’ In V.
B. Kataev et al. (eds.), Russkaia literatura XIX
veka I khristianstvo. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, pp. 25-31.
Mersereau J. (1962). Mikhail Lermontov. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press.
Mersereau, J. (1989). ‘‘The Nineteenth Century:
Romanticism 1820-40.’’ In C. A. Moser (ed.),
The Cambridge History of Russian Literature.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 136-88.
325
Motina, I.V. (1997). ‘‘Ob odnoi poeticheskoi traditsii v poezii M. Iu. Lermontova.’’ Russkii iazyk
v shkole: metodicheskii zhurnal, IV: 60-4.
Nedzvetskii, V. A. (1972). ‘‘Poet, tolpa, sud’ba
(Smert’ Poeta M. Iu. Lermontova).’’ Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR: Seriia literatury i iazyka,
XXXI: 239-47.
Ram, H. (1995). ‘‘Translating Space: Russia’s
Poets in the Wake of Empire.’’ In A. Dinwaney
and C. Maier (eds.), Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburg, PA and London: University of Pittsburg
Press, pp. 199-222.
Reid, R. (1997). Lermontov’s ‘‘A Hero of Our Time.’’
London: Bristol Classical Press.
Scott, W. (1932). Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,
vol. IV, ed. T. F. Henderson. Edinburgh and
London: Oliver and Boyd.
Smirnov, A. A. (1989). ‘‘Romanticheskii simvol v
lirike Lermontova.’’ Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta: Seriia 9, Filologiia, 5: 3-9.
Tynianov, Iu and Nikitina, Z. (1964). ‘‘Literaturnyi istochnik Smerti poeta.’’ Voprosy literatury,
VIII (10): 98-106.
Waszink, P. (1993). ‘‘Not Mine but the Poet’s
Heart: Vygotskij’s Concept of Katharsis and
Dialogical Speech in Album-Lines by Byron
and Lermontov.’’ In W. G. Weststeijn (ed.),
Dutch Contributions to the Eleventh International
Congress of Slavists: Bratislava 30/8/93-9/9/93.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 315-30.
Weststeijn, W. (2004). ‘‘Pushkin between Classicism, Romanticism and Realism.’’ In R. Reid
and J. Andrew (eds.), Two Hundred Years of
Pushkin. III: Pushkin’s Legacy. Amsterdam.
Rodopi, pp. 47-56.
19
Adam Mickiewicz and the Shape
of Polish Romanticism
Roman Koropeckyj
Upon hearing of the death of Adam Mickiewicz in 1855, his poetic and ideological
rival Zygmunt Krasiński (1812-59) proclai

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